tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163559542017-12-13T20:20:41.586+00:00Darwinian Conservatism by Larry ArnhartThe Left has traditionally assumed that human nature is so malleable, so perfectible, that it can be shaped in almost any direction. By contrast, a Darwinian science of human nature supports traditionalist conservatives and classical liberals in their realist view of human imperfectibility, and in their commitment to ordered liberty as rooted in natural desires, cultural traditions, and prudential judgments. Arnhart's email address is larnhart1@niu.edu.Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.comBlogger1035125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-39912717396065192182017-12-08T20:49:00.000+00:002017-12-10T19:23:34.731+00:00The Progressive View of Presidential Leadership in Claremont TrumpismThe current issue of <i>The New York Review of Books</i> (December 21, 2017) has an article by Jacob Heilbrunn on "Donald Trump's Brains" that identifies the Straussian conservatives associated with the Claremont Institute as the intellectuals with the most influence in the Trump administration.&nbsp; As its name indicates, <i>The Claremont Review of Books </i>has always tried to be the right-wing alternative to <i>The New York Review of Books.&nbsp; </i>It is remarkable, therefore, that this article in the <i>New York Review </i>includes a large reproduction of the cover of the spring 2016 issue of the <i>Claremont Review</i>, with its picture of Donald Trump, under the title "Lights. Camera. Faction!"<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ofM3JTuPyV4/Wiu6Z-muYoI/AAAAAAAABKQ/ruvyz2T6XbgASdJuMJYXTAsd3TObioi5QCLcBGAs/s1600/Claremont%2BTrump%2B.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1223" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ofM3JTuPyV4/Wiu6Z-muYoI/AAAAAAAABKQ/ruvyz2T6XbgASdJuMJYXTAsd3TObioi5QCLcBGAs/s320/Claremont%2BTrump%2B.jpg" width="244" /></a></div><br /><br />Heilbrunn gives an accurate account of how the West-Coast Straussians of the Claremont Institute have adopted Trump as their leader.&nbsp; He fails, however, to notice the fundamental contradiction in their position.&nbsp; He correctly identifies the Claremont argument that America needs to return to the principles of the American constitutional founding that have been eroded through the corrupting influence of American progressive thought beginning with Woodrow Wilson.&nbsp; But he does not notice how their support for Trump's populist leadership depends upon their adopting the progressive view of the president as a "man of the people" whose leadership must transcend the checks and balances of the founders' Constitution.<br /><br />Heilbrunn does not comment on the picture of Trump on the cover of the <i>Claremont Review</i>:&nbsp; Trump has the crown of a monarch on his head!&nbsp; This suggestion that the American president can and should have the royal prerogative powers of a monarch contradicts the argument of the American founders that the president as constrained by the Constitution does not have monarchic powers (as indicated, for example, in <i>The Federalist </i>number 67).&nbsp; But this does conform to the claim of the American progressives like Woodrow Wilson that the Constitution was flawed in establishing a "leaderless democracy," and that the president needed to break free of the constitutional system in exercising populist leadership.<br /><br />Moreover, Heibrunn does not notice that this progressivist view of presidential leadership is defended by Charles Kesler in that spring 2016 issue of the <i>Claremont Review</i>.&nbsp; Kesler speaks of Trump as a "strong leader" in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.&nbsp; Kesler quotes Wilson's claim that "the President is at liberty to be as big a man as he can," and he quotes Wilson's declaration that "the personal force of the President is perfectly constitutional to any extent which he chooses to exercise it."&nbsp; Kesler observes: "'Personal force'--not far from Trump's praise of high energy, toughness, and strength in the ideal chief executive."<br /><br />Kesler praises Trump for taking "a tough position in tough terms." After all, Kesler observes, "every republic essentially faces what might be called the Weimar problem.&nbsp; Has the national culture, popular and elite, deteriorated so much that the virtues necessary to sustain republican government are no longer viable?"&nbsp; In such times, the nation needs a "strong leader." <br /><br />Thus, Kesler implies that Trump is doing for the United States what Adolf Hitler did for Germany.&nbsp; Hitler promised to make Germany great again.&nbsp; Like Weimar Germany, the United States needs someone "to be as big a man as he can."&nbsp; After all, as Trump has said, in one of his favorite quotations from Mussolini, "it is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep."<br /><br />Oddly, in affirming the need for a President acting as a "strong leader" who is free "to be as big a man as he can," Kesler, the West-coast Straussian, seems to be agreeing with Harvey Mansfield, the East-coast Straussian, who has asserted the need for Presidents who&nbsp; show the "manly nihilism" of "one-man rule."<br /><br />If this follows from the teaching of Leo Strauss, then Will Altman was right to argue that Strauss was promoting Nazism, because he saw classical liberalism as so decadent that it needed the spirited manliness of Nazism--or&nbsp; Donald Trump--to save it.&nbsp; One of the writers at the <i>Journal of American Greatness</i>, in an article on "Paleo-Straussianism," has said of Strauss that "the philosophic mind he admired the most belonged to a Nazi."&nbsp; Altman has argued that Strauss's praise for Martin Heidegger and his refusal to repudiate Heidegger's Nazism is good evidence for Strauss's acceptance of Nazism, or at least some radically illiberal alternative to the liberal regime.<br /><br />Altman cited Strauss's comments about how every healthy society must be a "closed society" rather than an "open society."&nbsp; The Trumpist Straussians seem to conform to this&nbsp; by agreeing with Trump's claim that to make America great again, America must become a closed society not open to Muslims and immigrants from non-European countries.<br /><br />And yet, contrary to the Claremont Institute's progressive view of presidential leadership, which would allow Trump "to be as big a man as he can," the first year of Trump's presidency has shown that the constitutional limits on presidential power have frustrated Trump's hopes for one-man rule.&nbsp; In a recent <i>New York Times&nbsp;<a href="https://nyti.ms/2kLyMRS">article</a>, </i>it is reported: "Mr. Trump's difficult adjustment to the presidency, people close to him say, is rooted in an unrealistic expectation of its powers, which he had assumed to be more akin to the popular image of imperial command than the sloppy reality of having to coexist with two other branches of government."<br /><br />It is said that in his first few months in office, Trump regularly barked commands at Senators.&nbsp; But then, in one meeting, Senator Bob Corker snapped back: "I don't work for you, Mr. President."&nbsp; In another meeting, Trump repeatedly cut in while Senator Mitch McConnell was making an elaborate presentation on the complexity of health care, until McConnell told the President: "Don't interrupt me."<br /><br />So maybe the constitutional system of checks and balances really does work as it was intended by the framers to frustrate populist demagogues like Trump.&nbsp; And maybe we will see that when Trump is impeached or forced to resign.<br /><i></i><i></i><br />(In this post, I have used some passages from a previous&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2016/06/straussians-for-trump-degradation-of.html">post</a>.)Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-24212451853766998152017-12-04T17:28:00.001+00:002017-12-06T10:30:50.446+00:00The Dishonesty and Sophistry of Stephen Meyer's Intelligent Design TheoryThat Stephen Meyer is one of the four authors in <i>Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design </i>is fascinating, because these four authors identify themselves as biblical creationists, even though Meyer defends a position--intelligent design theory--that Meyer and its other proponents say is <i>not </i>creationist!<br /><br />This dishonesty in intelligent design theory--both denying and affirming biblical creationism--is made necessary by the rhetorical strategy of the Discovery Institute, the leading organization promoting intelligent design, where Meyer directs the Center for Science and Culture. <br /><br /><i></i>The modern intelligent design movement in America originated with William Jennings Bryan, an evangelical Christian, and a three-time presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, who took the side of the "fundamentalist" Christians, who defended a literal interpretation of the Bible as the inerrant word of God against the "modernist" interpretation of the Bible as compatible with modern science, and particularly the modern science of evolution.&nbsp; The modernists defended a theistic evolutionism, and Deborah Haarsma's evolutionary creation could be seen as belonging to that modernist tradition of thought.<br /><br />Continuing the tradition started by Plato, Bryan developed the four arguments that constitute the rhetoric of intelligent design.&nbsp; (I have elaborated these points in chapter 7 of <i>Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question</i>.)&nbsp; His scientific argument was that the Darwinian theory of evolution was not truly scientific because it was based not on empirical evidence but on the dogmatic commitment to a materialistic naturalism.&nbsp; His religious argument was that Darwinism promoted atheism by denying the truth of the Bible, and particularly by denying the biblical teaching that human beings were specially created by God in His image.&nbsp; His moral argument was that the atheistic materialism of Darwinism was morally corrupting.&nbsp; His political argument was that teaching Darwinism in the public schools was undemocratic, because it violated the wishes of the majority of parents, and because it denied the moral and religious principles of American political life as stated in the Declaration of Independence.<br /><br />This fundamentalist attack on Darwinism led to the dramatic trial of John Scopes in 1925 in Dayton, Tennesse.&nbsp; Scopes was tried for violating a Tennessee law that make it a misdemeanor for public school teachers "to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man had descended from a lower order of animal."&nbsp; Bryan acted as a lawyer for the prosecution against Scopes, while Clarence Darrow joined the lawyers defending Scopes.&nbsp; Scopes was convicted, although his conviction was overturned on a technicality by the Tennessee Supreme Court.&nbsp; Many states continued to enact laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution in the public schools.<br /><br />The publication in 1961 of <i>The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications </i>by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris sparked a revival of scientific creationism, which stressed Bryan's scientific argument against Darwinism--the claim that the biblical creation story was actually more scientific than Darwinian evolution, and therefore that biblical creation should be taught as science in public school biology classes.<br /><br />Creationists supported "balanced treatment" laws dictating that creation science be taught as a scientific alternative to Darwinian science in public school biology classes.&nbsp; Such a state law in Arkansas was struck down as unconstitutional in 1982 in a federal district court case <i>McLean v. Arkansas</i>, because teaching creationism was said to be an unconstitutional establishment of religion in violation of the First Amendment.&nbsp; The state of Arkansas did not appeal this decision, and so it did not reach the U.S. Supreme Court.<br /><br />In 1987, in the U.S. Supreme Court case of <i>Edwards v. Aguillard, </i>the creationists thought they had a better chance of winning, because the Louisiana law at issue in this case did not mandate the teaching of creation science, but it did require that if evolutionary science was taught in a public school biology class, creation science would have to be taught as an alternative.&nbsp; In a 7-2 decision (with Antonin Scalia and William Rehnquist dissenting), the Court decided that teaching scientific creationism did violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, because the primary intent was to teach a particular religious doctrine.&nbsp; It also held, however, that "teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind to school children might be validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction."<br /><br />Creationists saw that this left an opening for a new rhetorical strategy: if they adopted Bryan's scientific argument and claimed that creationist science was a strictly scientific position that did not depend on biblical teaching, they might justify teaching creationism in public schools as "validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction."&nbsp; Stephen Meyer and others who established the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture decided that the best way to do this would be to avoid the term "creationism" and, instead, to use the term "intelligent design," so that there would be no explicitly religious language of God as Creator.<br /><br />The success of this rhetorical strategy depends on covering up the dishonesty of this strategy.&nbsp; Meyer does this by insisting that his <i>personal </i>belief in biblical creationism is completely separate from his <i>purely secular</i> scientific argument for intelligent design, because the reasoning for intelligent design theory does not depend necessarily in any way on any belief in the supernatural.&nbsp; And, therefore, he insists, the intelligent design argument of the Discovery Institute is not a deceptive rhetoric strategy of creationists to get around the decision in <i>Edwards v. Aguillard </i>, so that scientific creationism can be taught under the guise of intelligent design in the public school biology classes.<br /><br />To support this conclusion, Meyer claims that a book by Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen--<i>The Mystery of Life's Origin</i>--"marked the beginning of interest in the contemporary theory of intelligent design" (198).&nbsp; And since this book was published in 1984, three years before the decision in <i>Edwards v. Aguillard, </i>Meyer observes, this proves that the intelligent design argument was not devised as a disguised form of creationism to evade that decision (179).<br /><br />Meyer points to the Epilogue of <i>The Mystery of Life's Origin</i> as presenting the "radical alternative" to evolution (198).&nbsp; But Meyer is silent about the fact that this Epilogue explicitly appeals to the idea of "Special Creation by a Creator beyond the cosmos" (Thaxton et al., 188, 196, 200, 209).&nbsp; So this book was explicitly a creationist book, in which terms like "intelligent cause" were terms for the Creator.&nbsp; This is what I mean by Meyer's dishonesty.<br /><br />Similarly, Meyer is silent about the biblical Creationism in the founding statement of the Center for Science and Culture--"The Wedge Document," which can be found&nbsp;<a href="http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.pdf">online</a>.&nbsp; The cover page has a reproduction of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam fresco for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, which makes clear the Creationist doctrine.&nbsp; The opening line of the document affirms "the proposition that human beings are created in the image of God."&nbsp; Meyer is identified as the Director of the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture.&nbsp; And the primary goal of the Center is declared to be "to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies," and "to replace materialistic explanation with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God."<br /><br />Meyer is also silent about the evidence supporting the decision in 2005 in the federal district court case of <i>Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Distinct </i>that a public school endorsement of an intelligent design textbook--<i>Of Pandas and People</i>--as teaching an alternative to evolutionary science was actually an unconstitutional establishment of creationist religion.&nbsp; The first versions of this book were written prior to the decision in <i>Edwards v. Aguillard</i>, with the hope that a favorable court decision would allow this book to be taught in public schools as a supplementary textbook promoting creation science.&nbsp; But when the court decision turned out to be unfavorable to the public-school teaching of creationism, the manuscripts for the book were revised so that the words "creationism" and "creation proponents" were replaced by the words "intelligent design" and "intelligent design proponents."&nbsp; When the evidence for this was presented at the Dover trial, this made it clear that using the term "intelligent design" was a rhetorical strategy for promoting creationism disguised as a purely secular science.<br /><br />Even if one sets aside the dishonesty of this rhetorical strategy, and looks at Meyer's substantive arguments for intelligent design theory as a real science, one can see the fundamental sophistry in his reasoning.&nbsp; Intelligent design reasoning depends completely on the fallacy of negative argumentation from ignorance, in which intelligent design proponents argue that if evolutionary scientists cannot fully explain the step-by-step evolutionary process by which complex living forms arise, then this proves that these complex forms of life must be caused by the intelligent designer.&nbsp; This is purely negative reasoning because the proponents of intelligent design are offering no positive explanation of their own as to exactly when, where, and how the intelligent designer caused these forms of life.<br /><br />For example, Meyer points out that building a new animal form requires not just new genes and proteins but also integrated networks of genes and proteins called developmental gene regulatory networks (dGRNs).&nbsp; He then argues that building a new dGRN from a preexisting dGRN requires altering the preexisting dGRN in some way that is likely to be catastrophic.&nbsp; "Given this, how could a new body plan--and the new dGRN necessary to produce it--ever evolve from a preexisting body plan and dGRN?&nbsp; Neither mainstream evolutionary biologists, nor evolutionary creationists have answered this question."&nbsp; <br /><br />If evolutionists cannot answer this question, Meyer assumes, this proves intelligent design.&nbsp; But notice that Meyer does not himself answer the question that he poses to the evolutionists.&nbsp; Exactly how could a new body plan--and the new dGRN necessary to produce it--ever be created by the Intelligent Designer from a preexisting body plan and dGRN?&nbsp; Meyer cannot answer this question, because he cannot explain exactly where, when, or how the Intelligent Designer achieves all of the miraculous effects attributed to Him by the proponents of intelligent design.&nbsp; Meyer insists that the proponents of evolutionary science satisfy standards of proof that he and his fellow proponents of intelligent design cannot satisfy, because his sophistical strategy is to put the burden of proof on his opponents, while refusing to accept that burden of proof for himself.<br /><br />Meyer admits that this argument from ignorance is a fallacy.&nbsp; But he tries to argue that proponents of intelligent design theory do not really commit this fallacy, because they offer explanations with positive content:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">". . . Proponents of intelligent design also offer design because we <i>know </i>that intelligent agents can and do produce specified information-rich systems.&nbsp; As the information theorist Henry Quastler observed, 'Information habitually arises from conscious activity.'&nbsp; Indeed, we have positive, experience-based <i>knowledge </i>of an alternative cause sufficient to have produced the effect in question--and that cause is intelligence or mind.&nbsp; Thus, design theorists infer intelligent design not just because natural processes do not explain the origin of specified information in biological systems, but also because we <i>know</i>, based upon our uniform experience, that intelligent agents, and only intelligent agents, produce this effect.&nbsp; That is to say, we have positive experience-based knowledge of an alternative cause (intelligence) that is sufficient to produce specified information" (204).</blockquote>Notice Meyer's subtle use of the fallacy of equivocation here--in the equivocation between <i>human </i>intelligent design and <i>supernatural </i>intelligent design.&nbsp; We have all had the experience of how <i>human </i>intelligent agents create artificial products by intelligent design.&nbsp; But it does not follow logically from this that we have all had the experience of how <i>supernatural </i>intelligent agents create artificial products by intelligent design.<br /><br />Consider a slight alteration in the last sentence in the passage quoted above.&nbsp; "That is to say, we have positive experience-based knowledge of an alternative cause (<i>human </i>intelligence) that is sufficient to produced specified information."&nbsp; Well, of course, we would all have to agree with that statement.&nbsp; But what about this--"That is to say, we have positive experience-based knowledge of an alternative cause (<i>supernatural </i>intelligence) that is sufficient to produce specified information"?&nbsp; There is no good reason for all of us to agree with that statement.&nbsp; The fallacy of equivocation here is Meyer's implicit assumption that since we all have "positive experience-based knowledge" of <i>human </i>intelligent agency, we therefore all have "positive experience-based knowledge" of <i>supernatural </i>or <i>divine </i>intelligent agency.&nbsp; The entire argument for the intelligent design explanation of the universe depends on this fallacious inference.<br /><br />Consider also this remark by Meyer as illustrating this equivocation:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">". . . We would not say, for example, that an archeologists had committed a 'scribe of the gaps' fallacy simply because--after rejecting the hypothesis that an ancient hieroglyphic inscription was caused by a sand storm--he went on to conclude that the inscription had been produced by a human scribe.&nbsp; Instead, we recognize that the archeologist has made an inference based upon his experience-based <i>knowledge </i>that information-rich inscriptions invariably arise from intelligent causes, not solely upon his judgment that there are no suitably efficacious natural causes that could explain the inscription" (205).</blockquote>Well, yes, again, we would all agree with this statement.&nbsp; But what if we inserted "divine scribe" in place of "human scribe"?&nbsp; That's different.&nbsp; Because while we have "experience-based <i>knowledge" </i>of how <i>human </i>intelligent causes work, we don't have "experience-based <i>knowledge</i>" of how <i>divine </i>intelligent causes work.&nbsp; The rhetoric of intelligent design theory depends on our not recognizing the equivocation here.<br /><br />William Dembski has said: "The point of the intelligent design program is to extend design from the realm of human artifacts to the natural sciences."&nbsp; This rhetorical strategy hides the fact that while detecting the design of <i>human </i>artifacts is a matter of common observation and logic, detecting the design of <i>divine </i>artifacts is not.<br /><br />So what would have to be done to turn intelligent design theory--or any other form of creationism--into a real science?&nbsp; Hugh Ross in <i>Four Views </i>provides a good answer:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"According to famed physicist Paul Davies, anyone presenting a model identifying the designer, citing specific dates, locations, and means of design, showing how their model could be falsified, and making short-range predictions of what scientists should discover (distinct from other models' predictions), has earned a seat at the science research and education tables.&nbsp; Commitment to such a model opens doors to discussion in public universities.&nbsp; It also elicits valuable critique from non-Christian research scientists and provides opportunities to draw them toward faith in Jesus Christ" (216).</blockquote>As long as Meyer and other proponents of intelligent design refuse to offer such a falsifiable model of intelligent design for scientific explanation, their position cannot be taken seriously as real science.<br /><br />Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-75290761776591882652017-11-29T23:51:00.002+00:002017-11-30T15:40:51.800+00:00Revelation Cannot Resolve the Creation/Evolution DebateUnlike&nbsp; the atheistic religiosity of Romantic conservatives like Roger Scruton, the theistic religiosity of evangelical Christians is grounded in their faith in the supreme authority of God's revelation--the special revelation of the Bible and the general revelation of nature, the "two books" in which God's revelation can be read by human beings.&nbsp; Remarkably, however, neither biblical revelation nor natural revelation provides a clear teaching to resolve the debate among evangelical Christians over creation and evolution.&nbsp; <br /><br />This becomes evident if one reads the new book edited by J. B. Stump--<i>Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design </i>(Zondervan, 2017).&nbsp; Four positions in the creation/evolution debate are represented by four leading proponents: Young Earth creationism (Ken Ham), Old Earth creationism (Hugh Ross), evolutionary creation (Deborah Haarsma), and intelligent design (Stephen Meyer).&nbsp; This is the first time that these four people have engaged one another directly.&nbsp; Each of the four has written a chapter, followed by responses from the other three, and then a rejoinder by the chapter's author.<br /><br />In John 17, Jesus prays to God that all believers will be as one, that they will come to complete unity, "so that the world may believe that you have sent me."&nbsp; It seems that Christians give witness to the truth of revelation by showing their agreement about that revelation.&nbsp; In Stump's "Introduction" to <i>Four Views</i>, he says that a primary purpose of this book was to pursue unity in what revelation teaches about origins (16).&nbsp; But in his "Conclusion" to the book, he laments that this has not been achieved: "I doubt that readers will come away from this book with the feeling that we are any closer to the goal of Christian unity on the topic of origins" (232).<br /><br />There are three possible explanations for this.&nbsp; Either there has been no revelation (through the Bible or through nature) of God's teaching about origins. Or there has been such a revelation, but it's so obscure that it conveys no clear message. Or the revelation does convey a clear message, but human beings have a stubborn bias that blinds them to that clear message.&nbsp; Hugh Ross says that "since most humans will choose autonomy over submission to God," most humans will refuse to see the clear evidence of God's creative activity in nature (166).&nbsp; But this atheistic bias cannot explain why faithful Christians--like the four authors in this book--would refuse to recognize the clear teaching of revelation.&nbsp; So we are left with the first two explanations for why these Christians cannot come to agreement about origins: either there has been no revelation about origins, or the revelation is not clear enough to be understood.&nbsp; All four of the authors believe that God has sent the Holy Spirit "to guide us persistently to truth" (71, 76, 107), but here the Holy Spirit has failed to guide them to agreement about the revealed teaching concerning origins.<br /><br />Like the other three authors, Ken Ham (the young earth creationist) sees God's revelation both in Scripture and in nature.&nbsp; But he thinks the biblical revelation is clearer and more truthful than natural revelation, because after Adam's Fall, God cursed creation, and so "the creation gives a confusing message about the Creator" (19).&nbsp; The creation reveals the Creator to all people, but it does not teach us <i>how </i>and <i>when </i>God created.&nbsp; For that, we must go to the Bible (101).<br /><br />Ham insists that the "clear teaching" of the Bible, particularly in the first 11 chapters of Genesis, is that God created everything over six literal days about 6,000 years ago; and therefore the claim of evolutionary science that life and the universe evolved naturally over billions of years is false.&nbsp; But Ham is silent about the fact that the dating of Creation at 6,000 years ago is not in the Bible.&nbsp; This date was inferred by Bishop James Ussher, who relied not just on the Bible but also on non-biblical documents.&nbsp; So this is not a "clear teaching" of the Bible.&nbsp; Moreover, Ham admits that "most Christians" or "many Christians" do not agree with his interpretation (24, 28, 31, 34, 38, 44, 46).<br /><br />Ham also claims that the Bible is clear in declaring that God created all the forms of plant and animal life by creating distinct "kinds" (Hebrew <i>min</i>), and that these created kinds correspond to what in modern classification would be called the <i>family </i>(not <i>species </i>or <i>genus</i>) (41, 105).&nbsp; Thus, new species can arise by natural evolution, but this evolutionary change is within the boundary of a "kind" or "family."&nbsp; Ham is silent, however, about how, prior to Darwin, "kinds" were interpreted as species.&nbsp; Once Darwin had shown how species can emerge by natural evolution, some creationists, beginning with Frank Marsh in 1941, began to argue that the Hebrew <i>min </i>was an "imprecise term," and that it should be interpreted not as <i>species </i>but as <i>family</i>.&nbsp; (I have written about this&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2017/04/thinking-about-galapagos-12-todd-woods.html">here</a>.)&nbsp; Ham has adopted this interpretation without acknowledging that it is an interpretation that is not a "clear teaching" of the Bible.&nbsp; (I have written a&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-nyeham-evolutioncreation-debate.html">post</a> on Ham's debate with Bill Nye in 2014.)<br /><br />Against Ham, Hugh Ross (the old earth creationist) insists that the Bible clearly teaches that the six days of creation in Genesis 1 are not literal 24-hour days but "ages"--long expanses of time that correspond to the billions of years for the creation of the universe, the earth, and life that has been confirmed by modern science.&nbsp; And yet, while disagreeing with Ham about dating, Ross agrees with Ham in reading the Genesis story literally.&nbsp; So, for example, he agrees with Ham that the human species was originally created with God's creation of Adam and Eve; and he predicts that genetic models will eventually show an initial human ancestral population of 2.&nbsp; The creation narrative in Genesis is "in perfect accord--both descriptively and chronologically--with the established scientific record" (83).&nbsp; The Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature are in concord.<br /><br />Ross believes that the evolutionary history of the universe and life show gaps that cannot be explained by purely natural evolutionary processes, because these gaps arise from God's miraculous intervention. For example, there is an unbridgeable gap between human beings and all other animals, because the creation of Adam and Eve was a miraculous work of the Creator.&nbsp; Similarly, mass extinction and mass speciation events show God's interventions into natural history.<br /><br />Unlike both Ham and Ross, Deborah Haarsma (the evolutionary creationist) does not see the creation story in Genesis as a literal history of nature's origins, and she does not see gaps in evolutionary history that require miraculous interventions by God to create what cannot arise by natural evolution.&nbsp; She writes: "<i>Evolutionary creation is the view that God created the universe, earth, and life over billions of years, and that the gradual process of evolution was crafted and governed by God to create the diversity of all life on earth. </i>Thus, evolution is not a worldview in opposition to God but a natural mechanism by which God providentially achieves his purposes" (125).<br /><br />Compared with the other three positions, Haarsma's evolutionary creation is closest to Darwin's idea of "dual causality": Darwin speaks of the laws of nature as manifested in evolution as "secondary causes," which leaves open the possibility of God's creative power acting through "primary causes" to create the original order of nature itself.&nbsp; I have written about this&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2013/08/debating-darwinian-liberalism-3-dual.html">here</a> and&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2011/06/evolution-as-secondary-causality-darwin.html">here</a>.<br /><br />Haarsma has carefully chosen the term "evolutionary creation" as an alternative to the term "theistic evolution," because the later term often suggests a deism in which the divine First Cause lacks the personal and providential traits of the Biblical God.&nbsp; Haarsma's Creator chooses to act through the evolutionary laws of nature rather than miraculous interventions, which distinguishes her position from that of Ham and Ross.&nbsp; But her Creator does engage in those miraculous acts that are necessary for human salvation--such as the incarnation and resurrection of Christ.&nbsp; Her Creator hears and answers prayers.&nbsp; Her Creator really is the Biblical God and not just Meyer's Intelligent Designer.&nbsp; (As I have indicated in another&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2017/04/i-do-not-believe-in-bible-darwins.html">post</a>, Darwin would have disagreed with Haarsma on this point, because he did not see any clear evidence that the Bible was a divine revelation.)<br /><i><b><br /></b></i>According to Haarsma, Genesis does not answer the <i>how </i>and <i>when </i>questions of science, but it does answer the <i>who </i>and <i>why </i>questions (131).&nbsp; Much of the Genesis story repeats the creation stories of the ancient Near East that the Israelites would have known.&nbsp; God accommodated his teaching to these beliefs.&nbsp; He could have corrected this cosmology, Haarsma observes, but he chose not to do that.&nbsp; God's only concern was to teach that there is only one God who is the sovereign creator of all, which departed from the ancient origin stories (128-30).&nbsp; In this interpretation, Haarsma follows the lead of John Walton, who argues that the Bible was written first to the peoples living in the ancient Near East, and therefore we should not expect that the cosmological teachings should correspond with a modern scientific understanding.<br /><br />But as Ham points out, this "accuses God of using error to teach truth" (156).&nbsp; If God had corrected the errors of ancient Near Eastern cosmology, wouldn't this have confirmed God's revelation as truth that was beyond human understanding prior to modern science?&nbsp; If there is no correction of ancient cosmology, does this imply that this is not really a revelation of a truth beyond the human beliefs of that time?<br /><br />Haarsma might respond that we can see this was a true revelation because it corrects ancient theology in teaching a monotheistic religion of a creator God that was new.&nbsp; But if we're going to read the Bible within its cultural setting, then we might notice that parts of the Bible seem to accept the polytheistic idea that different peoples have different gods (for example Judges 11:24).&nbsp; We might then wonder whether Yahweh was originally one of many gods who at some point was elevated to be the one universal and transcendent god of Israel, which is the argument of Thomas Romer in <i>The Invention of God </i>(Harvard, 2015).&nbsp; So why isn't God a cultural invention?&nbsp; To deny this, it would help to have a revelation in the Bible of cosmological truths that correct traditional cosmologies in ways that people of the ancient Near East could not have understood, but which might be confirmed by modern science.<br /><br />To all of this, Stephen Meyer (the intelligent design theorist) responds by arguing that although he <i>personally </i>believes in biblical revelation, he sees that the case for an intelligent designer as an alternative to materialist natural science is best made on purely scientific grounds without any appeal to biblical authority.&nbsp; He claims that the evidence of science based on our natural observations of the world point to the existence of an intelligent designer to explain the appearance of design in the natural world that cannot be explained plausibly by Darwinian evolutionary science.<br /><br />There are, however, as I will indicate in my next post, some serious problems with Meyer's argument.<br /><br />Here, I only want to make the point that the disagreement over origins among these four faithful Christians who have carefully studied both the Bible and science suggests that there has been no divine revelation that clearly resolves the debate among evangelical Christians over creation and evolution.<br /><br />So what?&nbsp; What difference does this make for orthodox believing Christians?&nbsp; Sometimes the authors in this book say the debate over origins is only a "secondary issue" for Christians, because one can be a believing Christian without resolving this debate (44-45, 60).&nbsp; But then Ham contends that the literal truth of Genesis 1-11 is the "foundation" of all the other doctrines of Christianity--it is "the foundation of the whole rest of the Bible" (18).&nbsp; If this is so, then those who disagree with Ham's interpretation of Genesis are destroying Christianity.<br /><br />Ham refers to the famous case of Anthony Flew, the British philosopher who argued for philosophic atheism until he was persuaded to accept the argument for intelligent&nbsp; design, and he became a deist.&nbsp; Ham observes that since Flew never accepted the clear revelation in the Bible of God as Creator and Jesus as Savior, he died "as a Christ-rejecting sinner who sadly will spend eternity in Hell" (210).&nbsp; So those who fail to receive the correct revelation of Biblical creationism will go to Hell!&nbsp; (My posts on Flew can be found&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2007/11/antony-flews-god.html">here</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2010/04/antony-flew-1923-2010.html">here</a>, and&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2006/10/antony-flews-review.html">here</a>.)<br /><br />Even if they don't go to Hell, professors at Christian schools who don't receive the correct revelation of creationism might lose their jobs.&nbsp; For example, the editor of <i>Four Views</i>--Jim Stump--was for many years a respected professor of philosophy at Bethel College in Indiana.&nbsp; But then the College adopted this declaration as part of their statement of&nbsp; faith: "We believe that the first man, Adam, was created by an immediate act of God and not by a process of evolution."&nbsp; Since Stump is a proponent of evolutionary creation, who works for Haarsma's BioLogos, the organization promoting evolutionary creation, he believes that Adam was indeed created by God through a natural process of evolution.&nbsp; Consequently, he was forced to resign from Bethel College.&nbsp; (I have written about the Adam controversy&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-genetic-evolution-of-adam-and-eve.html">here</a>.)<br /><i></i><i></i><br />So why are faithful Christians unable to reach any agreement about this question of creation, evolution, and ultimate origins?&nbsp; If the revelation of God's teaching in the Bible or in nature about origins is untrustworthy or unclear, why should we believe that there has been any revelation at all?<br /><br />Has the Holy Spirit failed us?Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-30825269622079269482017-11-20T22:39:00.002+00:002017-11-30T15:07:46.580+00:00Roger Scruton's Fallacious Argument in "On Human Nature"In his new book <i>On Human Nature </i>(Princeton University Press), Roger Scruton shows the straw man fallacy in criticizing the biological science of human nature as biological reductionism.&nbsp; Although some biologists do sometimes sound like absolute reductionists, most biologists--beginning with Charles Darwin himself--recognize that any biological science of human nature must explain the emergent differences in kind between human beings and other animals, for which there is no fully reductionist explanation. One needs to see, however, that these <i>emergent</i> differences in kind are not <i>radical </i>differences in kind that would require some creationist or Kantian metaphysics of transcendence.<br /><br />In <i>The Descent of Man </i>(Penguin Classics, 2004), Darwin did seem to be a reductionist when he declared that the differences between human beings and the other animals was only a difference in degree and not in kind:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"Some naturalists, from being deeply impressed with the mental and spiritual powers of man, have divided the whole organic world into three kingdoms, the Human, the Animal, and the Vegetable, thus giving to man a separate kingdom.&nbsp; Spiritual powers cannot be compared or classed by the naturalist: but he may endeavor to shew, as I have done, that the mental faculties of man and the lower animals do not differ in kind, although immensely in degree. A difference in degree, however great, does not justify us in placing man in a distinct kingdom" (173).</blockquote>Against this apparent reductionism, Scruton argues that human beings are irreducibly different in kind from other animals: "We are animals certainly; but we are also incarnate persons, with cognitive capacities that are not shared by other animals and which endow us with an entirely distinctive emotional life--one dependent on the self-conscious thought processes that are unique to our kind" (29-30).<br /><br />Other animals are conscious, Scruton contends, but only human beings are <i>self</i>-conscious in being able to say "I," who thus become <i>persons </i>rather than mere objects.<br /><i><br /></i>Other animals can communicate, but only human beings have language, which allows them to tell stories about themselves and their world; and thus they can live in imagined symbolic worlds that they have created for themselves, which includes the religious symbolism of stories about the divine.<br /><br />Other animals are social beings who can enforce rules of social cooperation, but only human beings have a moral sense by which they judge the conduct of themselves and others as right or wrong, good or evil, just or unjust.<br /><br />Scruton concedes that all of these distinctively human traits depend upon biological capacities in the brain that are objectively observable and thus open to scientific explanation.&nbsp; And yet, he argues, the uniquely human experiences of self-conscious awareness, understanding language, and moral judgment are inward subjective experiences of the mind that cannot be outwardly seen through objective observation, and therefore they cannot be studied by the natural science of biology.<br /><br />In all of this, Scruton assumes a fundamental dualism that originated in nineteenth-century Romanticism, which is conveyed in Wilhelm Dilthey's separation of <i>Geisteswissenschaften </i>(human sciences or sciences of the mind or the humanities) and <i>Naturwissenschaften </i>(natural sciences) (12, 22-23, 46).&nbsp; The natural sciences seek causal explanations of the objectively observable realm of Nature.&nbsp; The humanities seek interpretive understanding of the subjectively experienced realm of Spirit or Mind, which is the uniquely human realm.&nbsp; This kind of distinction is assumed in the way academic disciplines are organized in Western culture: the natural sciences and social sciences are separated from the humanities.<br /><br />Scruton illuminates this distinction through an analogy (30-32).&nbsp; When painters paint on a canvas, they create physical objects by physical means.&nbsp; When we look at the painting, we are looking at the physical blobs of paint on the physical canvas.&nbsp; But if we see a face in the painting, the face is in some manner something more than the physical blobs of paint.&nbsp; Seeing the face is a subjective experience in our inward mental experience.&nbsp; Natural science can explain the physical and chemical properties of the painting as objectively observable phenomena.&nbsp; But our subjective awareness of the face is an inward mental experience that cannot be reduced to the physical and chemical properties of the painting.&nbsp; Similarly, we might say that persons are to their bodies as seeing the face in the painting is to the physical blobs of paint on the canvas.&nbsp; <br /><br />Personhood is an <i>emergent </i>feature of the human organism that depends on the biological capacities of the organism but without being fully reducible to those biological capacities.&nbsp; The brain scientist can explain the natural physical and chemical properties of the brain that make personal subjectivity possible, but this cannot fully explain the subjective experience to which a person has direct access, but which is invisible to the scientific observer.&nbsp; We can design machines that paint pictures, but we cannot assume that those machines see faces in their pictures.&nbsp; Thus, the human person is an emergent entity rooted in the human animal body but belonging to a higher realm of reality beyond biology.<br /><br />Emergence occurs when quantitative differences pass over a critical threshold of complexity to become qualitative differences: differences of degree become differences in kind.&nbsp; So, for example, with rising temperature, ice becomes water, and then water becomes steam.&nbsp; Scruton concludes: "What we are trying to describe in describing personal relations is revealed <i>only </i>on the surface of personal interaction.&nbsp; The personal eludes biology in just the way that the face in the picture eludes the theory of pigments.&nbsp; The personal is not an <i>addition </i>to the biological: it emerges <i>from </i>it, in something like the way the face emerges from the colored patches on a canvas" (41).<br /><br />The straw man fallacy in Scruton's argument is in his false assumption that biologists must be reductionists who fail to see the need for the idea of emergence as part of their scientific explanation of subjective mental experience.&nbsp; In fact, as I have argued in various posts (<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2008/05/e-o-wilson-wendell-berry-and-question.html">here</a>, <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2008/05/adam-zeman-and-neuroscience-of-soul.html">here</a>, <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2008/10/e-o-wilsons-religion-of-consilience.html">here</a>, and <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2012/05/darwinian-natural-right-in-e-o-wilsons.html">here</a>), many biologists, beginning with Darwin, have recognized biological emergence.<br /><br />Despite Darwin's <i>explicit </i>statement that humans differ only in degree, not in kind, from other animals, he <i>implicitly </i>recognized all the differences in kind that are stressed by Scruton.&nbsp; That is to say, that Darwin recognized that human beings have some traits that other animals do not have at all. <br /><br />Darwin noted that self-consciousness is uniquely human: "It may be freely admitted that no animal is self-conscious, if by this term it is implied, that he reflects on such points, as whence he comes or whither he will go, or what is life and death, and so forth" (105).&nbsp; Morality is also uniquely human: "A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them.&nbsp; We have no reason to suppose that any of the lower animals have this capacity. . . . man . . . alone can with certainty be ranked as a moral being" (135).&nbsp; And language is uniquely human: "The habitual use of articulate language is . . . peculiar to man" (107).<br /><br />Darwin could implicitly affirm such <i>emergent </i>differences in kind without affirming any <i>radical </i>differences in kind.&nbsp; Emergent differences in kind can be explained by natural science as differences in kind that naturally evolve from differences in degree that pass over a critical threshold of complexity.&nbsp; So, for example, we can see the uniquely human capacities for self-consciousness, morality, and language as emerging from the evolutionary expansion of the primate brain, so that at some critical point in the evolution of our ancestors, the size and complexity of the brain (perhaps particularly in the frontal cortex) reached a point where distinctively human cognitive capacities emerged at higher levels of brain evolution that are not found in other primates.&nbsp; With such emergent differences in kind, there is an underlying unbroken continuity between human beings and their hominid ancestors, so there is no need to posit some supernatural intervention in nature that would create a radical difference in kind in which there is a gap with no underlying continuity.<br /><br />Scruton agrees with this in that human uniqueness emerges from small steps in evolution without any need for positing some separate miraculous origin for human beings: there is "no impassible gap" (66).<br /><br />Scruton and Darwin also agree about what Scruton calls "the mystery of the subjective viewpoint" (135).&nbsp; We can see the body through outward observation.&nbsp; But the mind is invisible, and we can know it directly only by our own inward experience of mental awareness; and therefore we can only infer mental experience in other human beings or other animals by interpreting their outward movements as evidence of inward subjectivity similar to our own.&nbsp; So, as Aquinas said, "the internal passions of animals can be gathered from their outward movements."<br /><br />Darwin recognizes "the impossibility of judging what passes through the mind of an animal" (105).&nbsp; But he believes that scientists can make reasonable inferences about the invisible subjectivity of animal minds from careful observation of their bodily movements and bodily expression of emotions. And, of course, this is what ethologists do when they infer animal psychology from observational and experimental studies of animal behavior.&nbsp; Ethologists thus engage in scientific "mind reading."&nbsp; And, as we have seen in some posts (<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2011/08/de-waaltomasello-debate-in-primate.html">here</a>), some ethologists see experimental evidence for other animals having a "theory of mind," so they read the minds of other animals.&nbsp; Oddly, Scruton ignores this when he asserts that interpreting animal minds is not part of science, but belongs only to the humanities and to ordinary folk psychology.<br /><br />Scruton also ignores the scientific study of what Darwin called the "mental individuality" of animals (Darwin, 106), which includes the study of "animal personality" (a topic for various posts&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2016/06/animal-personalities-biography-in.html">here</a> and&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2017/10/trumps-grandiose-narcissism-and-other.html">here</a>).&nbsp; Scruton does admit that other animals show "shallow individuality," although he insists that only human beings show "deep individuality" (80-82).<br /><br />And while Scruton denies that other animals have morality, he does admit that apes show "near equivalents of punishment, appeasement, and reconciliation" (84).<br /><br />If it is possible for biological scientists to study the mind--the <i>Geist</i>--then they can study those uniquely human traits that arise through mental subjectivity--self-consciousness, morality, and language--and thus biology can account for the fullness of human nature as including both body and mind.&nbsp; If this is true, then biology includes the <i>Geisteswissenschaften </i>as well as the <i>Naturwissenschaften</i>.<br /><br />And this biological study of human psychology includes the biological study of religious psychology as rooted in the evolved human propensity for detecting intelligent agency: just as we read the invisible minds of other human beings and other animals, we read the invisible mind of God.&nbsp; Our natural desire for religious understanding is rooted in our natural desire for understanding invisible minds.&nbsp; Evolutionary psychologists can agree on this without agreeing on whether this religious psychology points to the real existence of a divine mind, which has come up in posts (<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2011/02/does-believing-in-god-arise-from-our.html">here</a>).<br /><br />In his affirmation of atheistic religiosity, Scruton affirms religious longing as part of human nature grounded in evolved human psychology, but without affirming the doctrinal truth of that natural religion.<br /><br />Scruton's atheistic but religious conservatism resembles the position of other conservatives such as Peter Augustine Lawler, who have tried to argue that evolutionary science provides a true, but only partially true, account of human nature.<br /><br />Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-35696527888530154302017-11-17T17:26:00.000+00:002017-11-18T14:25:46.040+00:00Atheistic Religiosity in Kantian Conservatism: Roger Scruton on Wagner's "Ring" Cycle<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XRU1AJsXN1g/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XRU1AJsXN1g?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div><br /><br />Tomorrow, I will see the new production of Richard Wagner's <i>Die Walkure </i>at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.&nbsp; This is the second of the four operas in Wagner's <i>Ring </i>cycle.&nbsp; In the spring of 2020, Lyric will have performances of all four of the operas in one week, so that audiences can sit through all 17 hours of the cycle over a few days, as Wagner originally intended.<br /><br />As I have indicated in my previous posts on Wagner (<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2013/11/nietzsche-hitler-and-wagners-parsifal.html">here</a>, <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2013/02/lyric-operas-die-meistersinger-wagner.html">here</a>, <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2013/02/lyric-operas-die-meistersinger-2-is.html">here</a>, and <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-storytelling-instinct-in-tolkiens.html">here</a>), I regard <i>Die Meistersinger </i>as his best opera, because it shows how a free society with only a limited "night-watchman state" can foster the full range of human virtue, from the low to the high, including the virtuous&nbsp;cultural activities&nbsp;of art, science, and philosophy, and thus it provides no support for Hitler's Nazi statism.&nbsp; By contrast, Wagner's <i>Ring </i>cycle manifests the Romantic conception of art as appealing to the Dionysian emotions of an atheistic religiosity, which was so attractive to Hitler and the Nazis.<br /><br />It is this Wagnerian art of atheistic religiosity that appeals to conservative philosophers like Roger Scruton, as is evident in his book <i>The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelung" </i>(Allen Lane, 2016).&nbsp; Scruton is one of the preeminent theorists of political conservatism; and like many conservatives in Great Britain and the United States, he thinks a religious attitude is essential for a healthy moral order, and therefore that traditional religious experience needs to be defended against a Darwinian science that claims to explain the place of human beings in the natural world without any reference to a transcendent realm beyond nature.&nbsp; And yet--again like many other conservatives--Scruton does not believe in the literal truth of Christianity or any other religion.&nbsp; He wants to have a sense of the sacred that comes from religious emotions, but without the need to believe any religious doctrines.&nbsp; We know that God is dead, but we also know that human beings need to satisfy their religious longings for transcendence and redemption.&nbsp; That's the truth that Scruton sees in Wagner's <i>Ring </i>cycle.<br /><br />Scruton traces that truth back to Kant and to the German philosophers in the nineteenth century whose thinking was shaped by Kant's idealism: "Kant begat Fichte, who begat Hegel who begat Feuerbach; and Feuerbach began both Wagner and Marx" (16).<br /><br />I cannot embrace the atheistic religiosity of Kant, Wagner, and Scruton, because this line of thinking is incoherent self-deception, and because it led to the Nazi philosophers of the 1930s.&nbsp; (I have written a&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2010/01/nazi-philosophers-plato-fichte.html">post</a> on the Kantian idealism of the Nazi philosophers.)<br /><br />Scruton thinks that Wagner saw the "bleak truth" that "we are here on earth without an explanation and that if there is meaning, we ourselves must supply it" (36).&nbsp; "The core religious phenomenon, Wagner believed, is not the idea of God, but the sense of the sacred. . . . religion contains deep truths about the human psyche; but these truths become conscious only in art, which captures them in symbols.&nbsp; Religion conceals its legacy of truth within a doctrine.&nbsp; Art reveals that truth through symbols" (40).&nbsp; In other words, "Wagner sees his art as expressing and completing our religious emotions.&nbsp; Art shows the believable moral realities behind the unbelievable metaphysics" (41).&nbsp; Religion is an "elaborate fiction," because the gods exist only in human imagination, but in Wagner's imaginative art, the gods symbolize truthfully the spiritual needs of our human psychology (56).<br /><br />Our deepest spiritual need is redemption from a world that has no meaning.&nbsp; And Scruton believes that Wagner's <i>Ring </i>cycle satisfies our human longing for redemption.&nbsp; For Scruton, this is clearest in two parts of the <i>Ring.&nbsp; </i>First, in Act 3 of <i>Die Walkure, </i>which begins with the famous ride of the Valkyries.&nbsp; In the previous act, Siegmund has been killed, and Brunnhilde has taken his wife Sieglinde onto the saddle of her horse to save her from Wotan.&nbsp; Sieglinde sees no reason to live.&nbsp; But Brunnhilde tells her that she must live to save the child--the future hero Siegfried--whom she carries in her womb.&nbsp; The music introduces the motif of Siegfried as hero followed by a passionate climax with the motif of Sieglinde's blessing, which is often called the "redemption motif."&nbsp; This motif is not heard again until we hear it at the very end of the cycle as the last music we hear at the end of <i>Gotterdammerung </i>("The Twilight of the Gods").&nbsp; So, the meaning of the whole <i>Ring </i>cycle, it seems, is the artfully aroused emotion of redemption.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Q2tq8fFDVys/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q2tq8fFDVys?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div><br /><br />I must say that when my wife and I saw the complete <i>Ring </i>cycle at the Lyric Opera in April of 2005--four operas over six days--the closing music did leave us with an ecstatic feeling that might be identified as redemption.&nbsp; (Well, okay, we were also feeling exhausted relief that we had finally made it through the 17 hours of Wagnerian opera!)<br /><br />But then, as Scruton admits, anyone who wonders about what this really means must ask: redemption from what, to what, by whom?&nbsp; The Christian will answer: redemption from our sinful human condition, to an eternal life of bliss with God, by the grace bestowed on us by Jesus Christ.&nbsp; C. S. Lewis conveyed this thought in his account of his early life in <i>Surprised by Joy</i>.&nbsp; He remembered the first time he saw a book with the title <i>Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods </i>will illustrations of Wagner's <i>Ring </i>cycle.&nbsp; He became totally taken over by Wagner and Norse mythology.&nbsp; He tried to write a heroic poem on the Wagnerian version of the Nibelung story.&nbsp; Here he felt what he called "the stab of Joy" that would later be fulfilled in his conversion to Christianity.&nbsp; Wagner's <i>Ring </i>cycle was a pointer to something else--to the Joy that only Christians can know. <br /><br />But since Wagner and Scruton deny the truth of these Christian doctrines, this kind of redemption is not possible for them.&nbsp; The only redemption that can come through Wagner's operas is the artistically induced <i>feeling </i>of redemption, which does not require any belief in the literal truth of Christian redemption.<br /><br />I think Nietzsche was right--during the middle period of his writing career, when he freed himself from his Dionysian enchantment with Wagner--in saying that this is all a magician's trick that gives us the fake emotions of a fake redemption.&nbsp; It's entertainment for atheists who want religious feelings without religious doctrines.<br /><br />Scruton restates Nietzsche's objections to Wagner (296-99).&nbsp; But, oddly, Scruton doesn't even attempt to refute those objections.&nbsp; His only response to Nietzsche is to point out that in his last years Nietzsche revived the love for Wagner that he had had earlier in his life.&nbsp; "Clearly then, his attacks on Wagner did not cure him of the enchantment, and we are left wondering how sincerely he meant them" (299).&nbsp; Scruton then passes on without any further thought about what this reveals about Nietzsche's struggle with Wagner's atheistic religiosity.<br /><br />In many posts (some of which can be found <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2013/01/nietzsche-under-lou-salomes-whip_11.html">here</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2013/01/nietzsches-sociobiology-of-animal.html">here</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-religious-longing-for-myth-in.html">here</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2013/04/nietzsche-aristocratic-radical-or.html">here</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2013/09/nietzsches-darwinian-aristocratic.html">here</a>, and&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-nietzsches-pietism-overturned-his.html">here</a> ), I have argued that Lou Salome (the woman who turned down Nietzsche's proposal of marriage) understood Nietzsche better than all of the other commentators on Nietzsche.&nbsp; (I have also written about this in my Nietzsche chapter in <i>Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Pinker.</i>)&nbsp; <br /><br />Salome saw that Nietzsche was deeply moved by religious longings that made Wagner's art appealing to him, that he escaped from this only in the middle period of his writing (particularly in <i>Human, All Too Human</i>), when he adopted a scientific view of the world, which was the most intellectually defensible position that he ever took, but then in his later writings, he returned to the religious longings that were expressed in his attempt to create a new Dionysian religion.&nbsp; <br /><br />In his middle period, Nietzsche understood how the need for redemption had become so strong for human beings that even those who believe themselves to be atheists are moved by the religious desire to find some transcendent satisfaction through art.&nbsp; Those who might otherwise be considered atheistic free spirits enjoy music like Wagner's operas that stirs religious feelings without requiring belief in religious doctrines.&nbsp; Romantic art in general shows "the magic of religious feeling" as the modern artist appeals to those who have given up religious beliefs but who still yearn for religious ecstasy through art.&nbsp; (In his&nbsp;<a href="https://www.roger-scruton.com/about/music/understanding-music/181-nietzsche-on-wagner">essay</a> "Nietzsche on Wagner," Scruton jumps from Nietzsche's early writings to his later writings, while passing over in silence Nietzsche's middle writings.)<br /><i></i><i></i><br />In his middle period, Nietzsche defended a Darwinian science of evolution according to which "everything has evolved."&nbsp; By Nietzsche's Darwinian account, morality does not elevate human beings beyond the natural world, because human morality arises as a natural development of animal nature.&nbsp; There is no need for a redemptive transcendence of nature to give meaning to human life, because life, even in its mortality and contingency, is inherently good in its intrinsic purposefulness without any need for cosmic purposefulness.&nbsp; (I have&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2013/11/death-is-mother-of-beauty.html">suggested</a> that this thought is conveyed in Wallace Stevens' poem "Sunday Morning": "Death is the mother of beauty.")<br /><br />Scruton occasionally comes close to saying something like this, but then he insists on the need for redemption in a way that renders his thought incoherent.&nbsp; Explaining Wagner's operatic art, he observes:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">". . . it takes the turning points of human life and frames them as religious sacrifices--it is a 'making sacred' of those moments when we must pay the full cost of being what we are.&nbsp; It is not absurd to give to these moments the name that Wagner clung to when attempting to summarize their power--<i>Erlosung</i>, or redemption.&nbsp; He did not mean that word in its Christian sense, as invoking the promise and the purchase of a better life to come.&nbsp; He meant it as a description of the religious rite itself, and hence of the moment of transcendence on the tragic stage: the moment when life is shown to be intrinsically worthwhile, exactly when it is engulfed by the ambient nothingness" (302).</blockquote>But if we know that life is "intrinsically worthwhile," so that we have no need for "the promise and the purchase of a better life to come," then it makes no sense to say that life's worth depends on transcendence, if only the fake transcendence of operatic emotion.&nbsp; Moreover, it's hard to see how such fake transcendence works if we <i>know </i>it's fake.<br /><br />I suppose that Scruton would say that it's not completely fake, because the longing for transcendence in human nature is a <i>real </i>phenomenon of human psychology.&nbsp; That's his claim in his new book <i>On Human Nature</i>, which I will take up in my next post.<br /><br />Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-37387938809953406942017-11-10T15:34:00.000+00:002017-11-10T15:34:54.093+00:00The Lockean Social Contract in Ancient MesopotamiaIn various&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2012/11/lockes-evolutionary-history-of-politics.html">posts</a> in recent years, I have argued that John Locke's evolutionary history of politics has been largely confirmed by the modern research of evolutionary anthropologists and archaeologists.&nbsp; <br /><br />Locke was correct in seeing that most human beings throughout history have lived in a state of nature in which they were free, equal, and independent.&nbsp; They lived in families in small bands of hunter-gatherers, hunting wild animals and gathering wild plants.&nbsp; They organized their social lives through customary laws of mutual cooperation, and they settled conflicts through informal negotiation and arbitration, with each individual having a natural right to punish those who violated the customary laws.&nbsp; <br /><br />In time of war, they might appoint someone as a temporary chief to lead them in war.&nbsp; In time of peace, some prominent men might act as informal leaders.&nbsp; But they resisted any attempt by anyone to exercise dominant rule over them as an violation of their natural freedom and autonomy, and so they had no government.&nbsp; Despite the occasional wars between bands, this state of nature without government was generally a state of peace.&nbsp; <br /><br />But then, a few thousand years ago, as human beings moved from hunting and gathering to farming--harvesting domesticated plants and herding domesticated animals--it became harder to settle disputes peacefully.&nbsp; They consented to a government that would act as a common superior over them in making, judging, and executing laws.&nbsp; But those rulers who abused their governmental powers in oppressing their people rather than securing their natural rights could provoke popular resistance and rebellion, which could overthrow a tyrannical government and lead to establishing a new government that seemed more likely to effect their safety and happiness.<br /><br />Locke saw evidence for all this in the anthropological history of the New World, because he believed that "in the beginning all the world was America," and that "the Kings of the Indians in America" is "still a pattern of the first ages in Asia and Europe" (<i>Second Treatise</i>, paras. 49, 108).&nbsp; Archaeological studies over the past two centuries suggest that the transition from nomadic hunting and gathering to settled farming villages and then to cities with centralized states occurred for the first time in Mesopotamia between 5,200 BCE and 3,200 BCE. <br /><br />Does this new history of the earliest states in Mesopotamia confirm or deny Locke's history?&nbsp; James C. Scott's new book <i>Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States </i>helps to answer this question, because he provides a survey of how new evidence from the fields of prehistory, archaeology, ancient history, and anthropology brings into view how states arose in ancient Mesopotamia for the first time in human history.<br /><br />Beginning around 5,200 BCE, there is evidence in Mesopotamia for small towns of sedentary foragers, farmers, and pastoralists who manage their collective affairs and trade with the outside world.&nbsp; So even after the development of agriculture, with the farming of domesticated plants and the herding of domesticated animals, human beings still lived in societies without states.<br /><br />If one is looking for those attributes of "stateness" that point to "territoriality and a specialized state apparatus: walls, tax collection, and officials" (Scott, 118), then Uruk was the first state.&nbsp; A city wall was first built at Uruk around 3,200 BCE.&nbsp; By then Uruk was the largest city in the world, with a population somewhere between 25,000 and 50,000.&nbsp; Following the model of Uruk, roughly twenty other city-states arose in the Mesopotamian alluvium.&nbsp; As Scott indicates, each city was small enough that one could walk from the center to the outer boundary in a day.<br /><b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><br />Scott is best known for a series of books (Scott 1976, 1998, 2009, 2012) that shows an anarchist scorn for organized state societies, based on fixed-field agricultural production, as a plague upon humanity--bringing slavery, conscription, taxes, forced labor, epidemics, and warfare.&nbsp; For Scott, this explains why many people have rightly chosen to remain stateless; and in doing so, they have shown how ordinary people are capable of organizing their lives through spontaneously cooperative enterprises without any need for oppressive regimentation by the central planning of a state bureaucracy.&nbsp; Although libertarians and libertarian anarchists have pointed to Scott's books as supporting their opposition to statism, Scott himself rejects libertarian anarchism in favor of the socialist anarchism of those like Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin.&nbsp; <br /><br />You can see this in a YouTube video of a debate between Scott, David Friedman, and Robert Ellickson, with Ellickson speaking for classical liberalism as opposed to the anarchism of Scott and Friedman.<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/UXn2FH4hvn4/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UXn2FH4hvn4?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div>Some of my posts on anarchism can be found&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-evolution-of-governance-and.html">here</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2010/06/smash-state-anarchism-in-medieval.html">here</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-new-communism-and-socialist.html">here</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-marxist-critique-of-socialist.html">here</a>, and&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2014/01/hobbes-and-somalia-is-anarchy-better.html">here</a>.<br /><br />Although Locke was not an anarchist, he shows an anarchist propensity in his account of the state of nature as showing that life in stateless societies is natural for human beings, that there have been no governments throughout most of human history,&nbsp; and therefore formal governmental institutions are artificial creations of human will that have arisen only recently in human history.&nbsp; <br /><br />The evidence surveyed by Scott confirms this line of thought in Locke by showing that indeed most of human evolutionary history, for hundreds of thousands of years, has been a history of stateless societies without government in bands of hunter-gatherers.&nbsp; About 7,000 years ago, some people in Mesopotamia formed settled villages with farming and herding, but they still organized their social life without a state apparatus. &nbsp; It was only about 5,000 years ago that the first states began to appear first in Mesopotamia.&nbsp; Moreover, Scott shows, even after the emergence of states, most human beings continued to live outside the state as "barbarians."&nbsp; Even at the time of Locke's birth in the seventeenth century, a majority of the human population around the world was probably living in stateless societies.<br /><br />If this supports Locke as correct about the state of nature, then this sustains Locke's fundamental claim that human beings by nature have the ability and propensity to live in the natural and voluntary associations of stateless societies without centralized governmental rule.&nbsp; If this is so, then this also supports Locke's claim that human beings naturally can and will withdraw their obedience to a government that they see as oppressive in depriving them of their liberty and failing to secure their lives and property: they are naturally inclined to assert their natural right to resist and rebel against despotic government.&nbsp; It's in this way that we can understand all government to depend upon the consent of the individuals subject to its rule.&nbsp; This is what has been called the social contract theory of government, although Locke himself does not use the term "social contract."<br /><br />Scott, however, seems to deny that this is true for the history of the earliest states in Mesopotamia.&nbsp; In <i>Against the Grain</i>, he casually dismisses Locke's social contract theory in one sentence: "If the formation of the earliest states were shown to be largely a coercive enterprise, the vision of the state, one dear to the heart of such social-contract theorists as Hobbes and Locke, as a magnet of civil peace, social order, and freedom from fear, drawing people in by its charisma, would have to be reexamined."&nbsp; But then in the next two sentences after this passage, Scott seems to concede Locke's point that people can and will resist an oppressive state: "The early state, in fact, as we shall see, often failed to hold its population; it was exceptionally fragile epidemiologically, ecologically, and politically and prone to collapse or fragmentation.&nbsp; If, however, the state often broke up, it was not for lack of exercising whatever coercive powers it could muster" (26-27, 29). <br /><br />"Walls make states," Scott observes.&nbsp; And while walls might protect a city's people from invaders, the walls should also be seen as keeping the city's people inside--walls demonstrate "that the flight of subjects was a real preoccupation of the early state" (139).&nbsp; Repeatedly, Scott notes that the records of the Mesopotamian states are full of evidence of people running away from their states--slaves running away from their enslavement, soldiers running away from their conscripted service in war, taxpayers running away from oppressive taxation, laborers running away from coerced labor, and people generally running away from cities racked with famine and contagious diseases (150-64, 205-218).&nbsp; Scott also notes the evidence for frequent rebellions.<br /><br />When rulers were threatened by external invaders or internal enemies, the rulers were inclined to increase their extraction of resources from their people--increased confiscation of grain, increased taxation, increased conscription of laborers and soldiers.&nbsp; This increased exploitation of the people would provoke flight or rebellion that could bring the disintegration of the state.&nbsp; Commonly, historians describe this as a "collapse" of the state following by "dark ages" of stateless barbarism.&nbsp; But as Scott indicates, this language assumes an unjustified bias in favor of the state.&nbsp; A "collapse" of the state that brings a "dark age" might be better described as "a bolt for freedom by many state subjects and an improvement in human welfare" (209, 255).<br /><br />Scott doesn't reflect on how this "bolt for freedom" shows the people withdrawing their consent from the state, which confirms Locke's account of how people through resistance and rebellion against governmental tyranny reclaim their natural freedom.<br /><br />Seth Richardson (2010, 2016) has noted the evidence that over 3,000 years of Mesopotamian political life, there were hundreds of rebellions.&nbsp; He has also noted how these rebels were described by the state authorities: "characterizations of rebels as the violators of contracts (<i>mitgurtu, rikistu</i>) necessarily implied that some bilateral obligations were incumbent on the state through the framework of the social contract" (2016, 35).&nbsp; The Akkadian words <i>mitgurtu </i>and <i>rikistu</i> denote agreement, consent, contract, or treaty.&nbsp; Richardson suggests: "Those motifs relating to violation-of-contract strike a familiar chord to us moderns, since they suggest the premise of a social contract between ruler and ruled, or at least the existence of legal treaties and loyalty oaths" (2010, 9).<br /><br />Not only in ancient Mesopotamia, but also throughout the ancient Mediterranean world--the Near East, Greece, and Rome--one sees the same pattern of rebellions against the state in which rebels assert their natural freedom from oppression, and thus confirm Locke's understanding of government as dependent on the consent of the governed (Howe and Brice 2016).<br /><i><br /></i><br /><br />REFERENCES<br /><br />Howe, Timothy, and Lee Brice, eds. 2016. <i>Brill's Companion to Insurgency and Terrorism in the Ancient Mediterranean. </i>Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.<br /><br />Richardson, Seth. 2010. "Writing Rebellion Back Into the Record: A Methodologies Toolkit." In Seth Richardson, ed., <i>Rebellions and Peripheries in the Cuneiform World</i>, 1-27. New Haven, CN: American Oriental Society.<br /><br />__________. 2016. "Insurgency and Terror in Mesopotamia." In Howe and Brice 2016, 31-61.<br /><br />Scott, James C.&nbsp; 1976.&nbsp; <i>The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. </i>New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.<br /><br />__________.&nbsp; 1998. <i>Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.&nbsp; </i>New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.<br /><br />__________.&nbsp; 2009.&nbsp; <i>The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia.&nbsp; </i>New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.<br /><br />__________.&nbsp; 2012.&nbsp; <i>Two Cheers for Anarchism</i>. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.<br /><br />__________.&nbsp; 2017.&nbsp; <i>Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. </i>New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-73273261550928407002017-11-08T16:46:00.000+00:002017-11-11T13:38:02.392+00:00Amagi: Mesopotamian Liberty in the Goodrich Seminar Room<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-so9sP4a156Q/WgBsV3aCZpI/AAAAAAAABHg/8C73jPGMjb4gS_m6cojyRGn1evAftxYTQCLcBGAs/s1600/Amagi.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="339" data-original-width="933" height="116" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-so9sP4a156Q/WgBsV3aCZpI/AAAAAAAABHg/8C73jPGMjb4gS_m6cojyRGn1evAftxYTQCLcBGAs/s320/Amagi.png" width="320" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-J0eiQVw3adU/WgBtyzfqZII/AAAAAAAABHw/slVP7dOBEWs1TwmCqBxYOCSXZNzGEFRxwCLcBGAs/s1600/UrukaginaCone.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1063" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-J0eiQVw3adU/WgBtyzfqZII/AAAAAAAABHw/slVP7dOBEWs1TwmCqBxYOCSXZNzGEFRxwCLcBGAs/s320/UrukaginaCone.jpg" width="212" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>The cuneiform symbol above is the Sumerian word <i>amagi </i>or <i>amargi</i>, which is thought to be the first word in the oldest written language for "liberty."&nbsp; It appears on the clay cone above that is now in the Louvre Museum in Paris.&nbsp; This clay cone is a document commemorating the social reforms of Urukagina, who was the ruler over the Sumerian city-state of Lagash around 2350 B.C., and who had overthrown the ruling dynasty founded by Ur-Nansche about 2500 B.C.<br /><br />The Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer described this document in 1956 in his book <i>History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in Recorded History, </i>which was originally published under the title <i>From the Tablets of Sumer.&nbsp; </i>Pierre Goodrich, a successful Indiana businessman, read this book; and when he founded the Liberty Fund to promote the study of liberty, he decided that the cuneiform symbol for <i>amagi </i>should be the logo for Liberty Fund.&nbsp; <br /><br />Goodrich's search for the first word for liberty might be considered part of the search for the origins of the word "liberalism," which has been the subject of a previous&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-evolutionary-origins-of-word.html">post</a>.<br /><br />Goodrich used <i>amagi</i> in his design for what became the Goodrich Seminar Room in the Lilly Library of Wabash College in Indiana.&nbsp; At the center of the room is a large circular table.&nbsp; Around the room at the bottom of the walls are library shelves full of books.&nbsp; Etched into the high limestone walls of the room are the names of the writings and authors that Goodrich identified as contributing the most to our understanding of liberty and responsibility.&nbsp; The names are arranged chronologically to show the history of the idea of liberty.&nbsp; It shows the influence of Kramer's book in beginning in ancient Mesopotamia--first the symbol <i>amagi </i>and then the Ur-Nammu&nbsp; Code, Urukagina, Gilgamesh, and Hammurabi's Code.&nbsp; <br /><br />I visited this room some years ago as part of a Liberty Fund conference.&nbsp; It's a pilgrimage to Mecca for libertarians.<br /><br />You can take an interactive virtual tour of the Goodrich Seminar Room at the Liberty Fund&nbsp;<a href="https://www.libertyfund.org/goodrich-seminar-room">website</a>.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FGxxn0c7JZ0/WgHJ9JT2PdI/AAAAAAAABJA/zCzCK9hLpOEplXth1xQnZTnZtY7KgmvmQCLcBGAs/s1600/Goodrich%2BSeminar%2BRoom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="226" data-original-width="382" height="189" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FGxxn0c7JZ0/WgHJ9JT2PdI/AAAAAAAABJA/zCzCK9hLpOEplXth1xQnZTnZtY7KgmvmQCLcBGAs/s320/Goodrich%2BSeminar%2BRoom.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br />Goodrich was implicitly claiming that liberty as understood by classical liberals like himself was not a modern cultural invention of Western culture, because it was actually a human universal, rooted in human nature, that could be seen in the written records of the earliest states that arose first in Mesopotamia.&nbsp; And, consequently, the walls of this seminar room present the evolutionary history of human liberty beginning around 2400 B.C. in Sumer on the east wall and then moving through history across the south, west, and north walls (including 88 people such as Moses, Zarathustra, Socrates, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Aquinas, Locke, and Hume) and ending in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence on the right side of the north wall.&nbsp; <br /><br />There are two symbols on the walls.&nbsp; On the left end of the east wall, there is a symbol of the Sun.&nbsp; It's not clear whether this Sun of liberty is rising at the beginning of the history or setting at the end.&nbsp; The other symbol is a large cross on the west wall.&nbsp; Oddly, this is not located next to the name of Jesus Christ.&nbsp; It is located on the timeline between 300 A.D. and 400 A.D.&nbsp; Is this location in time connected to the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine in 312, or to the proclamation in 393 by Emperor Theodosius I that all citizens should be Christians?<br /><br />One has to wonder about Goodrich's principles of inclusion and exclusion.&nbsp; For example, he includes Socrates and Aristotle, but excludes Plato.&nbsp; He includes Origen, Ambrose, Boethius, Anselm, Francis of Assisi, and Thomas Aquinas, but excludes Augustine.&nbsp; He includes Savonarola, but excludes Machiavelli.&nbsp; He includes Locke, but excludes Hobbes and Rousseau.&nbsp; He includes two forms of religious singing--Roman chant (also called Gregorian chant) and Reformation chorale--but excludes all other forms of music, unless one considers Psalms to be a form of religious singing.&nbsp; <br /><br />And why does he stop with the Declaration of Independence?&nbsp; Is he suggesting that the Declaration is the fullest expression of the theory and practice of liberty, and as such the consummation of the history of liberty that began in ancient Mesopotamia?&nbsp; Is this, in some way, the end of history?<br /><br />When I was in this room, I thought about the fact that almost everything there depends on writing and written documents, beginning with <i>amagi</i>, a word in the first system of writing invented by human beings.&nbsp; (Later, there were three other independent inventions of writing--in Egypt, China, and Mayan Mesoamerica.)&nbsp; Was there a history of liberty before the invention of writing?&nbsp; Is writing necessary for the thoughtful exploration of the meaning of liberty, which had already arisen in an unreflective way in human experience before writing was invented?&nbsp; Does the invention of writing depend on the invention of the state?&nbsp; After all, for 500 years or more, the only purpose for cuneiform writing was bureaucratic bookkeeping for the state.&nbsp; But doesn't the state threaten the liberty enjoyed in stateless societies?&nbsp; Beginning in ancient Mesopotamia, only a tiny elite of scribes could read and write; and even up to the nineteenth century, most human beings were illiterate.&nbsp; If thinking about liberty depends on writing, does that mean that until recently most human beings could not think very deeply about liberty?&nbsp; Does human emancipation depend upon the emancipation of the mind through literacy and literate education?&nbsp; Is that what we mean by <i>liberal </i>education?&nbsp; Is that why Liberty Fund is organized around reading, discussing, and publishing written texts that illuminate the idea and practice of liberty?&nbsp; Are these the kind of questions Goodrich wanted his Seminar Room to evoke?<br /><br />My question here is whether Goodrich was right in locating the starting point for liberty in ancient Mesopotamia.&nbsp; In doing this, Goodrich denied the traditional idea of "Oriental Despotism."&nbsp; Beginning in ancient Greece, with Aeschylus and Herodotus, it has been common to contrast Eastern despotism and Greek liberty, so that liberty was seen as an innovation of the ancient Greeks.&nbsp; Later, those like Hegel saw modern liberty as emerging only with the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution: in the ancient Orient, only one person--the ruling despot--was free; in ancient Greece and Rome, some people--the class of citizens--was free; only in the modern West were all people, in principle at least, declared to be free.&nbsp; Thus, all of human history is the history of the unfolding of the idea of liberty.<br /><br />Karl Marx suggested that when agrarian societies first appeared in ancient Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, and ancient China, agriculture in those arid parts of the world depended upon bureaucratically planned irrigation systems, which centralized power in the hands of despotic rulers, and he called this the Asiatic Mode of Production.&nbsp; Later, Karl Wittfogel elaborated this idea in <i>Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power </i>(1957) as the "hydraulic theory" of ancient despotism.&nbsp; <br /><br />Recently, however, Sumerologists have pointed to evidence that agriculture arose in the rich alluvial areas of southern Mesopotamia where the flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers provided the conditions for growing grain, without any need for complex irrigation systems, and this supported agrarian settlements for two thousand years before the appearance of the earliest states (see Jennifer Pournelle's <i>Marshland of Cities: Deltaic Landscapes and the Evolution of Early Mesopotamian Civilization</i>, Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of California, San Diego; and her "Physical Geography," in Harriet Crawford, ed., <i>The Sumerian World </i>[Routledge, 2017], 13-32).<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EpkAG8IhLhk/WgDHI_O3bUI/AAAAAAAABIc/mxuh7U_hiXw9xPHgBcitmjWHW3pnqkQ2wCLcBGAs/s1600/mesopotamiairaq3500bc.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="460" data-original-width="500" height="294" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EpkAG8IhLhk/WgDHI_O3bUI/AAAAAAAABIc/mxuh7U_hiXw9xPHgBcitmjWHW3pnqkQ2wCLcBGAs/s320/mesopotamiairaq3500bc.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><u>Mesopotamia in 3,500 B.C.</u></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/--nFJY5WstDo/WgDHOOC5JGI/AAAAAAAABIg/uCv5ePz2vYU-Fw90K3nscWIQT-c3qXBkwCLcBGAs/s1600/mesopotamiairaq1500bc.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="460" data-original-width="500" height="294" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/--nFJY5WstDo/WgDHOOC5JGI/AAAAAAAABIg/uCv5ePz2vYU-Fw90K3nscWIQT-c3qXBkwCLcBGAs/s320/mesopotamiairaq1500bc.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><u>Mesopotamia in 1,500 B.C.</u></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />As these maps indicate, archaeologists now believe that in ancient Mesopotamia, the northern shoreline of the Persian Gulf was much farther north than it is today, so that what is today the city of Basra in southern Iraq would have been underwater, and the ancient cities of Lagash, Larsa, Uruk, and Ur would have been on or near the shoreline.&nbsp; Isolated agrarian settlements existed in the southern alluvium near the Persian Gulf around 5,200 B.C., at least two thousand years before the earliest states such as Uruk emerged around 3,200 B.C.<br /><i><br /></i>Moreover, some scholars now argue, even the early Mesopotamian states left a written record that shows both the idea and the reality of liberty, long before the Greek city-states.&nbsp; Daniel Snell has argued for this in his book <i>Flight and Freedom in the Ancient Near East </i>(Brill, 2001).&nbsp; Eva von Dassow has argued for this in her book chapter--"Freedom in Ancient Near Eastern Societies," in Karen Radner and Eleanor Robson, eds., <i>Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture </i>(2011), 205-24.&nbsp; Von Dassow, a professor of ancient Near Eastern history at the University of Minnesota, is now working on a book elaborating her reasoning.&nbsp; <br /><br />If we're persuaded by this position, then we would have to say that Goodrich was right to start his history of liberty with <i>amagi </i>in the ancient Mesopotamian documents.&nbsp; We could also conclude from this, as Snell does, that this shows the desire for liberty to be a human universal of evolved human nature, just as Goodrich claimed, and so the history of liberty has been the progressive expression of that natural desire.<br /><br />Liberty understood as liberation from constraint and oppression was manifest in the rhetoric of Mesopotamian kings like Urukagina, who promised to release their people from excessive taxation, debt servitude, and oppressive power.&nbsp; This release from encumbrance and subordination was understood as a restoration to an original state of liberty, which was expressed in the Sumerian word <i>amagi </i>and the Akkadian word <i>andurarum.&nbsp; Amagi </i>literally meant "return to mother," and it acquired the connotation of "emancipation" or "freedom."<br /><br />What did this mean in Urukagina's Lagash?&nbsp; I will follow Kramer's interpretation, since this so influenced Goodrich, but I know that there are other interpretations among the scholars of the ancient Near East.&nbsp; Kramer reports: "By and large, the inhabitants of Lagash were farmers and cattle breeders, boatmen and fishermen, merchants and craftsmen.&nbsp; Its economy was mixed--partly socialistic and state-controlled, and partly capitalistic and free" (46).&nbsp; While in principle, the soil belonged to the city god and his temple, much of the land was the private property of individuals.&nbsp; Much of the economic life was organized through free markets and free trade.<br /><br />But then a ruling dynasty over Lagash was established by Ur-Nanshe around 2500 B.C.&nbsp; These rulers expanded their power over Sumer through bloody wars of conquest, which were successful for almost a century.&nbsp; But then Lagash was weakened by attacks from other city-states, and particularly from the city of Umma.&nbsp; To raise and support armies, the rulers of Lagash increased taxes and appropriated property belonging to the temple.&nbsp; Palace bureaucrats and tax collectors were everywhere.&nbsp; And those who could not pay their taxes could be put into debt slavery.<br /><br />When Urukagina came to power, he made a special covenant with Ningirsu, the god of Lagash, that he would liberate the people of Lagash from the oppression of the Ur-Nanshe dynasty.&nbsp; He removed many of the bureaucratic controls over the economy, he restored to the temple the property that had been seized, he reduced the taxes, and he released those who had been put into debt slavery.&nbsp; This was a "return to mother" in the sense that he restored the people of Lagash to their original condition of liberty through what Kramer called "freedom under law."<br /><br />And yet in less than ten years, Urukagina was overthrown and Lagash conquered by Lugalzaggisi, the ruler of Umma, who then became the king of Sumer for a brief time.&nbsp; So the final lesson here might be that achieving and preserving liberty depends on the contingencies of warfare.<br /><br />Goodrich stressed the importance of law for Mesopotamian liberty by including two law collections--the Laws of Ur-Namma and Hammurabi's Code.&nbsp; (Good translations of these texts can be found in Martha T. Roth's <i>Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor </i>[Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 1997].)<br /><i><br /></i><br />King Ur-Namma of Ur liberated the city of Ur from being ruled by the city of Uruk.&nbsp; During his reign (2112-2095 B.C.), he founded the Third Dynasty of Ur, which united all the city-states of both southern and northern Mesopotamia.&nbsp; His collection of laws is the oldest such collection ever found.&nbsp; The tablets are fragmentary, however, and only the prologue and fewer than forty laws have been preserved.<br /><br />The Laws of Hammurabi were compiled toward the end of the reign of Hammurabi (1792-1750 B.C.), who was the sixth ruler of the First Dynasty of Babylon.&nbsp; This collection of laws is the longest and best preserved of the law collections from Mesopotamia.&nbsp; It consists of a prologue, as many as 300 laws, and an epilogue.&nbsp; This collection was copied and recopied over centuries in various parts of Mesopotamia.&nbsp; It was made world famous by the excavation in 1901-1902 of the black stone stela that is now in the Louvre Museum in Paris.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5rxx7HxcDSg/WgLi7F1Z5eI/AAAAAAAABJY/3JumEaYMuUskzQ7e2so6xyZj8xPHvK-TACLcBGAs/s1600/Hammurabi%2527s_Code%252C_Paris_25_April_2012.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1069" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5rxx7HxcDSg/WgLi7F1Z5eI/AAAAAAAABJY/3JumEaYMuUskzQ7e2so6xyZj8xPHvK-TACLcBGAs/s320/Hammurabi%2527s_Code%252C_Paris_25_April_2012.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fhouwKBDBSk/WgLjFLBpqyI/AAAAAAAABJc/S0VRkxXWrP4SMjPINFAfvaNOr5juvC3CgCLcBGAs/s1600/hammurabi-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="385" data-original-width="686" height="179" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fhouwKBDBSk/WgLjFLBpqyI/AAAAAAAABJc/S0VRkxXWrP4SMjPINFAfvaNOr5juvC3CgCLcBGAs/s320/hammurabi-2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tiLLLEagPe0/WgLjMGDnfwI/AAAAAAAABJg/IcRvsT-GFE0Bt2q3l_74lBL23rYy1LY1QCLcBGAs/s1600/hammurabi3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="466" data-original-width="768" height="194" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tiLLLEagPe0/WgLjMGDnfwI/AAAAAAAABJg/IcRvsT-GFE0Bt2q3l_74lBL23rYy1LY1QCLcBGAs/s320/hammurabi3.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>The Louvre stela is almost seven and a half feet tall.&nbsp; The top one-third of the stela shows the sun-god Shamash, the god of justice, seated on his throne, with King Hammurabi standing before him.&nbsp; It is not clear whether the god is dictating the laws to Hammurabi, or Hammurabi is presenting the laws to the god, or Hammurabi is accepting the rod and the ring that are the emblems of authority.&nbsp; In any case, this conveys the clear message to the viewers--even the many illiterate people who cannot read the laws--that Hammurabi's laws are divinely authorized by the god of justice.<br /><br />The prologues of both the Laws of Ur-Namma and the Laws of Hammurabi invoke the gods An and Enlil as the divine source of the king's authority.&nbsp; These gods are preeminent in the Sumerian creation myth that we know from the prologue to the Gilgamesh Epic.&nbsp; In the beginning, there was only Nammu, the primeval sea.&nbsp; Then Nammu gave birth to An, the sky, and Ki, the earth.&nbsp; An and Ki mated and gave birth to Enlil, who separated An from Ki and carried off the earth as his domain, while An carried off the sky.&nbsp; Thus, the laws of Ur-Namma and Hammurabi have the moral authority of cosmic divinity. <br /><br />Here in ancient Mesopotamia is the first cosmic teleology of human law rooted in divine law, which is restated in Plato's <i>Timaeus </i>and in the Bible, and which becomes the theme of the Divine Cosmic Model of the universe that runs through human civilization for four thousand years.&nbsp; Goodrich points to this in his many references to the texts and authors of theological cosmology as part of the history of liberty, culminating in the Declaration of Independence, which appeals to God as the cosmic Creator, Legislator, and Judge.&nbsp; <br /><br />Whether the natural law of liberty must depend on such a divine law of the cosmos has been a question raised in many posts&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2009/08/zuckerts-plato-teleology-and-eternity.html">here</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2009/07/brague-nietzsche-and-longing-for-moral.html">here</a>, and&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2009/09/c-s-lewis-and-medieval-model.html">here</a>.&nbsp; I have also written about the evolutionary science of moralistic "big gods"&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2014/12/did-cultural-evolution-of-big-gods-make.html">here</a>.<br /><br />In claiming theocratic sovereignty over their states, Ur-Namma and Hammurabi might seem to exemplify the tradition of Oriental Despotism and thus deny individual liberty.&nbsp; There are, however, at least two kinds of evidence in these law collections to justify Goodrich's including them in the history of liberty.<br /><br />The first kind of evidence for liberty in these documents is that the principal class of persons identified in these law collections is the free person called "man" (the Sumerian <i>lu </i>in Ur-Namma's laws and the Akkadian <i>awilu </i>in Hammurabi's laws), which includes men, women, and children.&nbsp; Citizens have the rights to freedom and security in one's person, family, and property.&nbsp; For example, the laws declare that free people are to be protected from physical assault, theft, and breach of contract.&nbsp; They are also protected in their engagement in marriage, family life, and free trade.<br /><br />Some classes of people are not fully free, however.&nbsp; The commoner (the Akkadian <i>muskenu</i>) is inferior to the free person in some rights and privileges.&nbsp; And the male and female slaves (<i>wardu </i>and <i>antu</i>) belong to free persons, commoners, or the palace.&nbsp; People could be enslaved by being captured in war, by incurring debt that they could not pay back, or by being born into slavery.&nbsp; And yet there were ways that slaves could be emancipated.&nbsp; Slaves could emancipate themselves by simply running away.&nbsp; That fugitive slaves were a problem is indicated by the laws in Hammurabi's Code for punishing runaway slaves and the people who help them run away (see paras. 15-20, 226-227).<br /><br />Thus, in these law collections, we see that the Mesopotamians recognized the idea and reality of freedom.&nbsp; Many people were free, and they expected the government to secure their freedom.&nbsp; Those people who were enslaved could claim their freedom by running away.&nbsp; But while we see slaves resisting their enslavement, we don't see slaves seeking to abolish the institution of slavery.&nbsp; We don't see any Mesopotamians affirming that all human beings are by nature born free and equal.&nbsp; That affirmation comes much later in Goodrich's history of liberty in the writing of Locke and the Declaration of Independence.<br /><br />In a previous&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2017/05/slaves-did-not-abolish-slavery.html">post</a>, I have noted that while humans claiming freedom and resisting enslavement can be seen throughout history, the idea of completely abolishing slavery is a new idea that arose with Lockean liberalism.<br /><br />The second kind of evidence for freedom in these law collections is what one scholar has called "the curious absence of the state in the text" (Seth Richardson, "Before Things Worked: A 'Low-Power' Model of Early Mesopotamia," in Clifford Ando and Seth Richardson, eds., <i>Ancient States and Infrastructural Power: Europe, Asia, and America </i>[University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017], 37).&nbsp; In his prologue and epilogue, Hammurabi claims absolute divinely granted authority over Babylonia.&nbsp; But in the hundreds of laws in his code, there is almost no reference to himself or to the central state as providing judgment or enforcement of the law.&nbsp; Most of the laws seem to assume private enforcement: when something goes wrong, the wronged party must act on his own with the help of local people to investigate, try, convict, and punish the guilty parties.&nbsp; <br /><br />This is what today we would call "private governance," the subject of a previous&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-evolution-of-governance-and.html">post</a>.&nbsp; We could also say that what we see here is what Seth Richardson has called the "presumptive state": the early states in Mesopotamia were presumptive in claiming a sovereignty that they did not in fact possess ("Early Mesopotamia: The Presumptive State," <i>Past and Present, </i>no. 215 [May 2012]: 3-49).&nbsp; Their rhetorical <i>claims</i> for absolute sovereignty have been mistakenly interpreted as evidence for the <i>reality </i>of Oriental Despotism.<br /><br />Once we see how in actuality the powers of the Mesopotamian state were severely limited, we can see how they left plenty of room for liberty.</div><i><br /></i> <i><br /></i>Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-27453403182922180812017-11-04T15:00:00.002+00:002017-11-04T22:33:01.469+00:00A New Orangutan Species--Rousseau's Natural Man?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VQBPeVqSLzc/Wf3DP-ZCARI/AAAAAAAABGo/dQ0O9GAsK0oshLcN-F3ADHZ-lIQN96b1wCLcBGAs/s1600/ORANGUTAN1-master768NewSpecies.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="768" height="213" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VQBPeVqSLzc/Wf3DP-ZCARI/AAAAAAAABGo/dQ0O9GAsK0oshLcN-F3ADHZ-lIQN96b1wCLcBGAs/s320/ORANGUTAN1-master768NewSpecies.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CccKfCSozxU/Wf3NHRuCn7I/AAAAAAAABHI/4sabjkuDJE0-L1MTnl462eD-I6xtJNrjgCLcBGAs/s1600/orangutan2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="267" data-original-width="400" height="213" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CccKfCSozxU/Wf3NHRuCn7I/AAAAAAAABHI/4sabjkuDJE0-L1MTnl462eD-I6xtJNrjgCLcBGAs/s320/orangutan2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br />Primate taxonomists have identified six living species of non-human great apes: Sumatran and Bornean orangutans, eastern and western gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos.&nbsp; The Sumatran and Bornean orangutans were first identified as separate species in 2001.&nbsp; Now, a team of biologists has identified a third orangutan species--the Tapanuli orangutan <i>Pongo tapanuliensis</i> (pictured above). The orangutans are our most distant evolutionary relatives among the living hominids, and now the Tapanuli orangutan seems to be the oldest evolutionary lineage in the genus <i>Pongo.&nbsp; The New York Times </i>has an&nbsp;<a href="https://nyti.ms/2iVdPD6">article</a> on this, which includes a link to the report: Alexander Nater et al., "Morphormetric, Behavioral, and Genomic Evidence for a New Orangutan Species," <i>Current Biology </i>27 (November 20, 2017): 1-12.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-02Df8cTbAm8/Wf3EfUfItxI/AAAAAAAABGw/HeKWiXL6HsIeR31_fHfYzvCA1TLAEDLvwCEwYBhgL/s1600/Lake_Toba_location.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="269" data-original-width="316" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-02Df8cTbAm8/Wf3EfUfItxI/AAAAAAAABGw/HeKWiXL6HsIeR31_fHfYzvCA1TLAEDLvwCEwYBhgL/s1600/Lake_Toba_location.png" /></a></div><br /><br />The Tapanuli orangutan is found south of Lake Toba in northern Sumatra in the Tapanuli Forest.&nbsp; The other Sumatran orangutan species--<i>P. abelii</i>--is found north of Lake Toba.&nbsp; The third orangutan species--<i>P. pygmaeus</i>--is found in Borneo.&nbsp; Orangutans in the wild are not found anywhere else in the world.<br /><br />The Tapanuli orangutan has been found to be both morphologically and genomically distinct from the other two species.&nbsp; This analysis also suggests that the Tapanuli orangutan was the first orangutan species to arrive in Sumatra about three and a half million years ago from mainland Asia.<br /><br />As I have indicated in a&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2013/09/was-rousseaus-natural-man-orangutan.html">previous post</a> a few years ago, I am sure that Jean-Jacques Rousseau would have been fascinated by these studies, because he inferred from some reports about apes in the wild that savage man in the state of nature was actually an orangutan as "a sort of middle point between the human species and the baboons."&nbsp; He looked forward to the time when scientists would travel the world to study the ape ancestors of human beings to understand the evolutionary history of humanity in the state of nature.<br /><br />Rousseau would have discovered, however, that these modern studies deny his claim that the earliest human ancestors were utterly solitary animals, and thus "man is naturally good," because solitary individuals free from any dependence on others have no motive to be wicked.&nbsp; In fact, orangutans have a complex social life organized around the social bond between mothers and their offspring and a dominant adult male.<br /><br />Here, then, is an example of how a claim in political philosophy--Rousseau's account of an asocial state of nature--can be refuted by the empirical science of evolutionary biology.<br /><br />Recently, Nelson Lund--in his book <i>Rousseau's Rejuvenation of Political Philosophy: A New Introduction </i>(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)--has tried to defend Rousseau's position as confirmed by modern primatology and anthropology.&nbsp; He concludes: "Orangutans live much like man in Rousseau's pure state of nature; gorillas generally live in patriarchal family bands, much as Rousseau imagines man must have lived after the 'first revolution'; and chimpanzees are cooperative and contentious hunter-gatherers, like the people in Rousseau's 'nascent society'" (54).<br /><br />Lund fails to see, however, that the complex social life of orangutans is not at all like the utterly solitary life of Rousseau's "nascent man" in the state of nature.&nbsp; I have elaborated this point in my chapter on Rousseau in <i>Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Pinker </i>(2015).<br /><i></i><i></i><br />Rousseau's interest in orangutans as possibly revealing the ancestral origins of human evolution is well studied in Robert Cribb, Helen Gilbert, and Helen Tiffin's <i>Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutan </i>(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2017).<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><br /></div>Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-73382201865351078872017-10-26T17:23:00.002+01:002017-10-27T14:34:10.962+01:00Trump's Grandiose Narcissism and Other Chimpanzee Personalities<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wSqJe2Xv31o/WfM1Feh0mII/AAAAAAAABGE/PiMBVUg5JaAEcx85TnJVBQQ2YqFpgM5RgCLcBGAs/s1600/Ferdinand.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="530" data-original-width="795" height="213" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wSqJe2Xv31o/WfM1Feh0mII/AAAAAAAABGE/PiMBVUg5JaAEcx85TnJVBQQ2YqFpgM5RgCLcBGAs/s320/Ferdinand.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uMaoICqJ8ns/WfM1ivRET4I/AAAAAAAABGI/wdd2CSqxHHISPvjlK5iiptkJiaDvzEOmgCLcBGAs/s1600/Trump%2Bchimp.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="808" data-original-width="1000" height="258" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uMaoICqJ8ns/WfM1ivRET4I/AAAAAAAABGI/wdd2CSqxHHISPvjlK5iiptkJiaDvzEOmgCLcBGAs/s320/Trump%2Bchimp.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3sbb4PQGUzA/WfM1t2I8xpI/AAAAAAAABGQ/Hz6OQT-3ZKQ7yHThi8bitiv7s-gXpI_rQCLcBGAs/s1600/trump-mussolini%2B2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="205" data-original-width="292" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3sbb4PQGUzA/WfM1t2I8xpI/AAAAAAAABGQ/Hz6OQT-3ZKQ7yHThi8bitiv7s-gXpI_rQCLcBGAs/s1600/trump-mussolini%2B2.jpg" /></a></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Donald Trump's Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a reminder of the importance of personality in political life.&nbsp; This should draw attention to the biological science of political psychology, which includes the biological study of nonhuman animal personalities as showing the evolutionary roots of the personality traits manifest in U.S. presidents and other political actors.</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">Psychologists have identified two different dimensions of the narcissistic personality--grandiose narcissism and vulnerable narcissism.&nbsp; Trump is obviously a grandiose narcissist.</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">Psychologists have studied grandiose narcissism among U.S. Presidents.&nbsp; Here's the abstract for one study (Watts et al. 2013):</span><br /><br /><div align="LEFT"><span style="font-family: ITCGaramondStd-Lt; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-family: ITCGaramondStd-Lt; font-size: xx-small;"></span></span></div><div>"Recent research and theorizing suggest that narcissism may predict both positive and negative leadership behaviors.&nbsp; We tested this hypothesis with data on the 42 U.S. presidents up to and including George W. Bush, using (a) expert-derived narcissism estimates, (b) independent historical surveys of presidential performance, and (c) largely or entirely objective indicators of presidential performance. Grandiose, but not vulnerable, narcissism was associated with superior overall greatness in an aggregate poll; it was also positively associated with public persuasiveness, crisis management, agenda setting, and allied behaviors, and with several objective indicators of performance, such as winning the popular vote and initiating legislation.&nbsp; Nevertheless, grandiose narcissism was also associated with several negative outcomes, including congressional impeachment resolutions and unethical behaviors.&nbsp; We found that presidents exhibit elevated levels of grandiose narcissism compared with the general population, and that presidents' grandiose narcissism has been rising over time.&nbsp; Our findings suggest that grandiose narcissism may be a double-edged sword in the leadership domain."</div><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">This study built upon the data set of Rubenzer and Faschingbauer (2004), who had 121 expert raters (such as historians and psychologists who have studied the lives of the U.S. presidents) evaluate the personality of the 41 U.S. presidents up to and including Bill Clinton.&nbsp; Watts et al. (2013) added ratings of George W. Bush from a previous study.&nbsp; They were then able to rank the first 42 presidents for their grandiose narcissism.&nbsp; Here are the top seven:</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">1. Lyndon Johnson</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">2. Teddy Roosevelt</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">3. Andrew Jackson</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">4. Franklin D. Roosevelt</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">5. John Kennedy</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">6. Richard Nixon</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">7. Bill Clinton</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">This suggests that Trump's grandiose narcissistic personality is not unique among the U.S. presidents, although we might wonder whether Trump manifests a more extreme form of this personality than any other president.&nbsp; Perhaps this shouldn't surprise us.&nbsp; After all, shouldn't we expect that the sort of person who would have the driving ambition for power that would motivate him to successfully win the presidency would often have the traits of a grandiose narcissist--such as fearless dominance?</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">These same personality traits can be seen in other political animals.&nbsp; I have written about the biology of animal personalities (<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2016/06/animal-personalities-biography-in.html">here</a>), and particularly chimpanzee personalities (<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-biopolitical-history-of-gombe.html">here</a>).&nbsp; For me, this shows that any biopolitical science needs to include the biological biographies of the individual animals in any political community.&nbsp; The biological study of the political life of any animal community must include not only the genetic history of the species and the cultural history of the community, but also the individual history of the political actors in the community, with each individual having distinct personality traits.</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now, a new&nbsp;<a href="http://www.nature.com/articles/sdata2017146">article</a> (Weiss et al. 2017) presents a study of the personality traits of the chimpanzees in the Kasekela and Mitumba communities of Gombe National Park in Tanzania.&nbsp; <i>The New York Times </i>has an&nbsp;<a href="https://nyti.ms/2h60ZOq">article</a> on this study.</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">The method for identifying the personality traits of these chimpanzees was essentially the same as that used for studying the personalities of U.S. presidents.&nbsp; The personalities of 128 chimpanzees in Gombe were rated on 24 items from the "Hominoid Personality Questionaire," which is a slightly modified version of questionaires used to rate the personality of human beings as following the "five-factor-model" of personality based on five domains--Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (OCEAN).&nbsp; The ratings were made by the Tanzanian field assistants who have observed the chimpanzees at Gombe almost daily for over 30 years.</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">For each of the 24 items, the raters were asked to rate a chimpanzee on a seven point scale from low to high.&nbsp; Each item was stated as an adjective along with one or two descriptive sentences.&nbsp; Here are some examples:</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"FEARFUL: Subject reacts excessively to real or imagined threats by displaying behaviors such as screaming, grimacing, running away or other signs of anxiety or distress."</span></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"DOMINANT: Subject is able to displace, threaten, or take food from other chimpanzees.&nbsp; Or subject may express high status by decisively intervening in social interactions."</span></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"RECKLESS: Subject is rash or unconcerned about the consequences of its behaviors."</span></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"THOUGHTLESS: Subject often behaves in a way that seems imprudent or forgetful."</span></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"VULNERABLE: Subject is prone to be physically or emotionally hurt as a result of dominance displays, highly assertive behavior, aggression, or attack by another chimpanzee."</span></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"BULLYING: Subject is overbearing and intimidating towards younger or lower ranking chimpanzees."</span></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: inherit;">&nbsp;"AGGRESSIVE: Subject often initiates fights or other menacing and agonistic encounters with other chimpanzees."</span></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"IMPULSIVE: Subject often displays some spontaneous or sudden behavior that could not have been anticipated.&nbsp; There often seems to be some emotional reason behind the sudden behavior."</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">These ratings were statistically analyzed for "interrater reliability"--that is, the degree to which the ratings of the same chimp by different raters agree.&nbsp; For most of the items, the interrater reliabilities ranged from acceptable to good.</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">There are three important conclusions from this study.&nbsp; First, this confirms that, like other animals that have been studied, these chimps really do show individual personalities.&nbsp; Second, the patterns in the personalities of these wild chimps are similar to those found among captive chimps in zoos or study facilities.&nbsp; Finally, this shows remarkable similarities in personality traits between these chimps and human beings, which suggests an evolutionary continuity in personality traits.</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">Notice how some of the items in the above list apply to Trump.&nbsp; Dominant?&nbsp; Reckless?&nbsp; Thoughtless?&nbsp; Bullying?&nbsp; Aggressive?&nbsp; Impulsive?&nbsp; I have written some posts on "Trump's Chimpanzee Politics" (<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2016/03/donald-trumps-chimpanzee-politics.html">here</a><u>&nbsp;</u> and&nbsp;<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2017/09/trump-and-political-scientists.html">here</a>).</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">Notice also that the study of presidents found a connection between grandiose narcissism and impeachment resolutions and unethical behavior. If Trump is impeached by the Congress, or if the Cabinet uses the 25th Amendment to declare him "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office," we will have to decide whether Trump's personality traits are so dangerous for the country that he should be removed from office. </span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">Can the president's authority to launch nuclear strikes with thousands of nuclear warheads be trusted to someone with the most extreme form of grandiose narcissism, perhaps even more extreme than Lyndon Johnson or any other previous president?&nbsp; Or should the Congress declare that the president has no constitutional authority to launch a preemptive attack without a congressional declaration of war?</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><br /></i><i><br /></i><i>REFERENCES</i></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">Rubenzer, S. J., and T. R. Faschingbauer. 2004. <i>Personality, Character, and Leadership in the White House: Psychologists Assess the Presidents</i>. Brassey's Inc.</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">Watts, Ashley, et al. 2013.&nbsp; "The Double-Edged Sword of Grandiose Narcissism: Implications for Successful and Unsuccessful Leadership Among U.S. Presidents." <i>Psychological Science </i>24: 2379-2389.</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">Weiss, Alexander, Michael Wilson, D. Anthony Collins, Deus Mjungu, Shadrack Kamenya, Steffen Foerster, and Anne E. Pusey. 2017. "Personality in the Chimpanzees of Gombe National Park." <i>Scientific Data </i>4, article number: 170146.</span>Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-21314720437516946322017-10-25T12:39:00.002+01:002017-10-25T14:48:53.679+01:00Is Emporiophobia (Fear of Markets) Rooted in Our Evolved Human Nature?I have often argued against Friedrich Hayek's claim that socialism appeals to our evolved instincts, as shaped by our evolutionary&nbsp;history in hunter-gatherer bands, and therefore that capitalism requires a cultural repression of those natural instincts.&nbsp; In making that argument, I have disputed the common assumption that the "mismatch" theory of evolutionary psychology supports Hayek's claim.<br /><br />I have argued that evolutionary anthropology sustains the conclusion that a capitalist liberal culture appeals to the evolved human instincts for social exchange or trade and for the liberty expressed as resistance to oppression that can be seen in hunter-gatherer bands.&nbsp; Adam Smith was right to see that the "system of natural liberty" is rooted in our innate instincts and that the opulence that results from exchange and specialization is the necessary consequence of "a certain propensity in human nature . . . the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another."<br /><br />Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and anthropologists like Richard Lee have been mistaken in believing that "our ancestors were communists" (Lee 1991, 255).&nbsp; Actually, our hunter-gatherer ancestors were "the original libertarians" (Mayor 2012).<br /><br />I have developed my argument in some posts <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2016/10/socialism-and-human-nature-cosmides.html">here,</a> <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-mps-in-galapagos-evolutionary.html">here,</a> <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-natural-desire-for-complete-and.html">here,</a> <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2016/08/deirdre-mccloskey-and-evolutionary.html">here.</a>, and <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-freiburg-workshop-naomi-becks.html">here.</a><br /><br />And yet Hayek's socialism-as-evolutionary-atavism thesis continues to be defended by scholars who think about the evolutionary psychology of economics.&nbsp; In recent years, Paul Rubin has contended that "folk economics"--the intuitive economics of ordinary people with no training in economics--shows what he calls "emporiophobia" (the fear of markets), based on the Greek&nbsp;words<em> emporion</em> (for a trading market) and <em>phobia</em> (for fear).&nbsp; And he sees this as showing the evolved human nature that was shaped by evolution in ancient hunter-gatherer bands&nbsp;(Rubin 2003, 2014).&nbsp;&nbsp;<em>&nbsp;</em>Now, Pascal Boyer and Michael Bang Petersen have elaborated Rubin's reasoning in an article accepted for publication in <em>Behavioral and Brain Sciences </em>(Boyer and Petersen 2017).&nbsp; Here we can see the theoretical rigor and empirical evidence supporting Hayek's thesis that Hayek himself never provided.<br /><br />According to Rubin, folk economics is mistaken in seeing the economic world as a zero-sum world in which a gain for one person must be a loss for someone else, while economists correctly understand that economic exchange can be positive-sum in showing the gains from trade, so that in any voluntary economic transaction, both sides benefit.&nbsp; Folk economics arises from instinctive intuitions that evolved in our hunter-gatherer ancestors living in a world without specialization, division of labor, capital investment, or economic growth--a world without markets.&nbsp; The mismatch between that Paleolithic world without markets and the modern world of extended trade in markets explains the mistakes of folk economic thinking in its assumption that markets are bad.<br /><br />So, for example, folk economics assumes that international free trade is bad, because if foreigners are profiting from trading with us, we are losing out in that this creates unemployment at home.&nbsp; For another example, people often say "The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer," which implies that the rich have caused the poverty of the poor by outcompeting them.&nbsp; Again, the fundamental assumption is that free markets must create zero-sum competition with winners and losers.<br /><br />To see the mistakes in folk economics, people need to be taught economic science.&nbsp; Unfortunately, Rubin observes, the teaching of economics stresses market <em>competition</em> rather than market <em>cooperation</em>.&nbsp; To show this, he surveys some of the leading textbooks in economics, and he points out that there are far more references to competition than to cooperation.&nbsp; This reinforces the assumption of folk economics that markets always require&nbsp;competition, with winners and losers, and so we need to restrict or regulate markets to promote cooperation rather than competition.<br /><br />To overcome this, Rubin proposes changing the way economics is taught, so as to stress cooperation rather than competition.&nbsp; In fact, the fundamental insight of economics is that every economic transaction is cooperative, because all parties expect to benefit from a transaction, otherwise they would not agree to it, and therefore it's a act of mutually beneficial cooperation.&nbsp; Of course, competition is essential, but only as a tool facilitating cooperation.&nbsp; Competition sets terms for cooperation and selects the best partners for cooperation.&nbsp; When economic agents compete with one another, they are competing for the right to cooperate with others.&nbsp; The most successful competitor is the one who is most successful in cooperating with others--either by selling to more buyers or buying from more sellers.&nbsp; When people are taught to understand this, they will see that markets are fundamentally cooperative rather than competitive, which dispels the fear of markets as bad or immoral in promoting a destructive competition in society, a fear that arises from evolved instincts that distort the reality of markets in the modern world<br /><br />Boyer and Petersen extend and deepen Rubin's reasoning by laying out an evolutionary cognitive model that specifies how cognitive systems that evolved in ancestral hunter-gatherer bands now shape the fear of markets in folk economics.&nbsp; They present eight examples of folk-economic beliefs.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">1. International trade is zero-sum, has negative effects.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">2. Immigrants steal jobs.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">3. Immigrants abuse the welfare system.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">4. Necessary social welfare programs are abused by scroungers.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">5. Markets have negative social impact ("emporiophobia").</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">6. The profit motive is detrimental to general welfare.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">7.&nbsp;Labor is the source of value.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">8. Price-regulation has the intended effects.</blockquote>Each of these beliefs can be explained as connected to an evolved cognitive bias.&nbsp; For example, the&nbsp;belief that international trade must be zero-sum can be seen as arising from the evolved cognitive propensity for forming coalitions in competition with other coalitions.&nbsp;&nbsp;The evolved human mind is inclined to identify nations as competing coalitions, and therefore we are inclined to believe that when foreign nations benefit from trading with us, our nation is harmed, because if the other nations are winning, we are losing.&nbsp; (Doesn't this remind us of Donald Trump's rhetoric against free trade?)<br /><br />But even if this explains the folk-economic <em>beliefs </em>of ordinary people that show <em>fear </em>of markets, it does not explain the economic <em>behavior </em>of these people that shows&nbsp;<em>endorsement</em> of markets.&nbsp; Most of those Americans who condemn international free trade as unfair to America are happy to shop at WalMart and buy imported Chinese goods if they think they are the best products for the price.<br /><br />Rubin recognizes this when he quotes Frederic Bastiat as saying "each man is in practice an excellent economist, producing or exchanging according as he finds it more advantageous to do the one or the other" (Rubin 2003, 167).&nbsp; So while Rubin complains that the economic beliefs of ordinary people show ignorance of economics, he sees that in practice people show themselves to be excellent economists!<br /><br />The quotation from Bastiat comes from his discussion of theory and practice in the debate between the proponents of free trade and the proponents of protectionism.&nbsp; The theorists of free trade say: "It is better to buy from another what it would be more costly to make oneself."&nbsp; The theorists of protectionism say: "It is better to make things oneself, even if it would be less expensive to buy them from another."&nbsp; Bastiat points out that only the first assertion enjoys the support of universal practice.&nbsp; That's why the theorists of protectionism want to use coercion to <em>compel </em>people to produce what they would find more advantageous to purchase.&nbsp; <br /><br />While the theory of protectionism is contrary to practice, Bastiat observes, the theory of free trade is "so little opposed to practice that it is nothing else than <em>practice explained.</em>"&nbsp; So what he means in saying that "each man is <em>in practice </em>an excellent economist" is that "everyone gains a knowledge of this science through experience; or rather, the science itself is only this same experience accurately observed and methodically interpreted" (Bastiat 1968, 84).&nbsp; <br /><br />Human beings show in their behavior a practical understanding of why markets are good, because of the gains from trade, which does not require any formal training in economic theory.&nbsp; And this practical understanding of markets shows how the institutions of capitalism can elicit the evolved propensities of the human mind for cooperation through trading or exchange.&nbsp; This is why, against Hayek, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby have argued that evolved instinctive rules can be triggered by the experience of different environmental cues, so that capitalist institutional cues can trigger trading behavior for mutually beneficial exchange.&nbsp; Or, as Tooby has put it, "vast market-based economic systems exploit for their amazing productivity one cognitive system that evolved to handle explicit contingent exchange (the social exchange system)," and "the effects of most other psychological mechanisms terminate locally (parenting, love, friendship), but explicit exchange can extend far beyond individual perception globally through the miracle of markets."<br /><br />This suggests that there are evolved cognitive systems that promote market behavior, and so Adam Smith was right about there being a natural propensity to truck, barter, and exchange.<br /><br />Boyer and Petersen recognize that folk economic beliefs "do not govern people's economic behavior," because&nbsp;people "who say that markets are 'bad' may still behave as roughly rational agents in markets, and they may even detect the advantages of competition in their everyday economic behavior" (5, 32-33).&nbsp;&nbsp;Boyer and Petersen&nbsp;recognize that people have folk-economic beliefs that are "incompatible with their own behavior in markets," and they cannot explain this: "the actual connections between micro-processes of economic decision-making on the one hand, and folk-economic beliefs on the other, remain unexplored" (39, 41).<br /><br />Boyer and Petersen do not consider the possibility that even though people untrained in economics often do not have a good <em>intellectual </em>understanding of markets, they do have a good <em>practical </em>understanding of why markets are good, as manifest in their economic behavior, and this shows how the cognitive system for social exchange&nbsp;that evolved among our ancestral hunter-gatherers can be elicited in modern capitalist environments to sustain extended market behavior.<br /><br />That this is the case is indicated by the remarkable triumph of capitalism over socialism in the past 150 years.&nbsp; After V. I. Lenin led the Bolsheviks to power in Russia in 1917, he set out the next year to leap directly into pure socialism by abolishing all buying and selling in markets and having all economic activity controlled by governmental planning, which was called "war communism" (Richman 1981).&nbsp; This produced an economic disaster.&nbsp; If Russia did not totally collapse, it was only because the natural human impulse towards markets could not be completely suppressed, and so most of the economic activity went underground into illegal black markets.&nbsp; By 1921, in response to popular uprisings that threatened to overthrow the regime, Lenin publicly admitted the failure of war communism, and he announced the "New Economic Policy," which legalized buying and selling in markets.&nbsp; <br /><br />Never again have socialists tried to totally abolish markets.&nbsp; They have tried to severely restrict markets, but even that has been subverted by people going into illegal markets.&nbsp; In some countries today, most of the economic activity is in underground markets that evade governmental controls and taxation.<br /><br />Even those European countries that are regarded as most successful in their socialism--such as the Nordic social democracies--are not really socialist but rather welfare state capitalist systems.&nbsp; As I have argued in some posts (<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2014/06/nordic-social-democracy-as-capitalist.html">here</a> and <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2016/12/human-progress-6-measuring-evolution-of.html">here)</a>, these countries rank high on the Human Freedom Index, which includes economic freedom for markets.<br /><br />It is hard to explain this if one assumes that human beings have evolved instincts to fear markets and love socialism, because "our ancestors were communists."&nbsp; It is easier to explain if one assumes that human beings have evolved instincts for liberty and a propensity to truck, barter, and exchange, because our ancestors were "the original libertarians."<br /><br /><br />REFERENCES<br /><br />Bastiat, Frederic. 1968. <em>Economic Sophisms</em>. Trans. Arthur Goddard. Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education.<br /><br />Boyer, Pascal, and Michael&nbsp;Bang Petersen. 2017. "Folk-Economic Beliefs: An Evolutionary Cognitive Model<em>." Behavioral and Brain </em>Sciences (forthcoming).&nbsp; Available <a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X17001960">online</a>.<br /><br />Lee, Richard B. 1991. "Reflections on Primitive Communism."&nbsp;In <em>Hunters and Gatherers: History, Evolution, and Social Change</em>, eds.<em>&nbsp;</em>Tim Ingold, David Riches, and James Woodburn, pp. 252-68. New York: Berg.<br /><br />Mayor, Thomas. 2012. "Hunter-Gatherers, The Original Libertarians." <em>The Independent Review</em> 16 (Spring): 485-500.&nbsp; Available <a href="http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_16_04_01_mayor.pdf">online.</a><br /><br />Richman, Sheldon. 1981. "War Communism to NEP: The Road from Serfdom." <em>The Journal of Libertarian Studies</em> 5 (Winter): 89-97.&nbsp; Available <a href="https://mises.org/library/war-communism-nep-road-serfdom">online.</a><br /><br />Rubin, Paul H. 2003. "Folk Economics." <em>Southern Economic Journal </em>70: 157-71.<br /><br />Rubin, Paul H. 2014. "Emporiophobia (Fear of Markets): Cooperation or Competition?" <em>Southern Economic Journal </em>80: 875-89.<br /><br />ADDENDUM<br /><br />After reading this post, Pascal Boyer sent me the following comment:<br /><br />I just read your blog post and must say I agree with most or all of it.<br /><div>But of course (when were academics happy with what other people say about their work?), I must say I am worried that you write:</div><div><br /></div><div><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , &quot;utopia&quot; , &quot;palatino linotype&quot; , &quot;palatino&quot; , serif , serif , &quot;emojifont&quot;; font-size: 15.4px;">Boyer and Petersen do not consider the possibility that even though people untrained in economics often do not have a good&nbsp;</span><em style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia,Utopia,&quot;Palatino Linotype&quot;,Palatino,serif; font-size: 15.4px; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">intellectual&nbsp;</em><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , &quot;utopia&quot; , &quot;palatino linotype&quot; , &quot;palatino&quot; , serif , serif , &quot;emojifont&quot;; font-size: 15.4px;">understanding of markets, they do have a good&nbsp;</span><em style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia,Utopia,&quot;Palatino Linotype&quot;,Palatino,serif; font-size: 15.4px; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">practical&nbsp;</em><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , &quot;utopia&quot; , &quot;palatino linotype&quot; , &quot;palatino&quot; , serif , serif , &quot;emojifont&quot;; font-size: 15.4px;">understanding of why markets are good, as manifest in their economic behavior, and this shows how the cognitive system for social exchange&nbsp;that evolved among our ancestral hunter-gatherers can be elicited in modern capitalist environments to sustain extended market behavior.</span></div><div><br /></div><div>We not only consider that possibility, we make it explicit, and even reiterate it at several points in the paper, e.g.:</div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: &quot;calisto mt&quot; , serif , &quot;emojifont&quot;; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 135%;">In this regard, it is important to note, again, that emporiophobia is a matter of stated, explicit beliefs, which may or may not reflect the intuitive principles that actually guide people’s economic behavior. People who say that markets are “bad”, may still behave as roughly rational agents in markets, and they may even detect the advantages of competition in their everyday economic behavior. But, if asked whether a given domain of activity should be left to a market of competitors, or when asked the extent to which markets should be regulated, they readily express the view that market outcomes are socially detrimental.</span>&nbsp;</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp;</div><div>But, OK, the point was buried in the text and should have been made much salient. It is in fact a really fascinating problem: most people will routinely accept that having two butchers in their town is better than having one, and yet, will opine that ‘markets’ should not ‘dictate’ economic activity. Understanding how this inconsistency can be sustained is difficult but necessary.&nbsp;</div><div></div>Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-65271695789397853722017-10-15T20:23:00.001+01:002017-10-15T21:39:33.838+01:00Sapolsky (6): Determinism, Free Will, and Natural Freedom in the Legal SystemIn 1987, Robert Sapolsky was the recipient of one of the MacArthur Foundation's "genius grants."&nbsp; Some years later, he received a letter from the Foundation asking him to submit some Big Ideas for a funding initiative.&nbsp; The letter said something like "Send us a provocative idea, something you'd never propose to another foundation because they'd label you crazy."&nbsp; <br /><br />So he sent them a proposal titled "Should the Criminal Justice System Be Abolished?"&nbsp; He argued that the answer was clearly yes, because neuroscience had proven that all human conduct is biologically determined, and therefore there is no free will, which means that the criminal justice system is wrong in holding people morally responsible for their behavior.&nbsp; When the Foundation accepted this proposal and organized a conference on this, Sapolsky and other neuroscientists began debating lawyers, law professors, and judges, who tried to defend the standards of legal responsibility against Sapolsky's claim that those standards are unscientific in so far as they assume free will.&nbsp; As a result of this conference, the Foundation has funded a general program for "neurolaw"--applying neuroscience to the study of law--and one of the primary issues has continued to be this debate over whether neuroscience justifies abolishing a legal system that assumes the reality of free will.<br /><br />Ah yes, many of my critics would say, don't you see here, Arnhart, that this is the disastrous consequence of your biological science of human nature--biological determinism denies the concept of free will that supports our legal and moral judgments of human responsibility?&nbsp; The only way to avoid this, they insist,&nbsp;is to recognize that human beings have a spiritual capacity for free will that transcends their biological nature and for which there is no natural biological explanation.<br /><br />In response to this criticism, I have argued that biological explanations of human nature in general and of the human brain in particular are fully compatible with traditional conceptions of moral and legal responsibility (see my posts <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2008/06/stephen-morse-and-neuroscience-of-law.html">here,</a> <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2008/10/emergent-freedom-of-mind-in-brain-reply.html">here,</a> <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2010/09/aristotles-darwinian-ethics-2.html">here,</a> <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2010/09/free-will-and-dilleys-secrecy.html">here,</a> <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.it/2008/05/e-o-wilson-wendell-berry-and-question.html">here,</a> and <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2008/05/adam-zeman-and-neuroscience-of-soul.html">here).</a>&nbsp; <br /><br />To see this compatibility, we must reject the idea of "free will" as uncaused cause. Whatever comes into existence must have a cause. Only what is self-existent from eternity--God--could be uncaused or self-determined. The commonsense notion of liberty is power to act as one chooses <em>regardless of the cause of the choice</em>. Human freedom of choice is not freedom from nature but a natural freedom to deliberate about our natural desires so that we can organize and manage our desires through habituation and reflection to conform to some conception of a whole life well lived. This is how Aristotle understood&nbsp;"deliberate choice" (<em>proairesis</em>)<br /><br />Similarly, Darwin believed that "every action whatever is the effect of a motive," and therefore he doubted the existence of "free will." Our motives arise from a complex interaction of innate temperament, individual experience, social learning, and external conditions. Still, although we are not absolutely free of the causal regularities of nature, Darwin believed, we are morally responsible for our actions because of our uniquely human capacity for reflecting on our motives and circumstances and acting in the light of those reflections. "A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives--of approving of some and disapproving of others; and the fact that man is the one being who certainly deserves this designation is the greatest of all distinctions between him and the lower animals."<br /><br />If we understand moral responsibility in this way, and see this as the conception of responsibility assumed in the law, then neuroscientific research on the natural causality of the brain is no threat to moral and legal responsibility. Stephen Morse--a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who specializes in psychology and law--has laid out the case for this conclusion based on a "compatibilist" view of moral choice. <br /><br />As Morse indicates, the "hard determinists" and the "metaphysical libertarians" agree that "free will" would require a "contra-causal freedom." But while the determinists deny there is such a thing. The libertarians affirm its existence as an uncaused cause beyond natural causality. If we had to choose between these two positions, neuroscience would favor the determinists.<br /><br />But Morse rightly argues that the law's conception of responsibility does not require a "contra-causal freedom." It requires only that human beings have sufficient practical rationality to understand their choices and to act on their deliberate decisions. When rationality is so diminished that someone cannot understand or act on his choices--a child or someone who is insane, for example--then we excuse their behavior and do not hold them fully responsible for their actions. But this conception of moral and legal responsibility as based on the capacity for practical deliberation or rationality does not require any transcendence of natural causality.<br /><br />Sapolsky has debated Morse, and in <em>Behave</em>, he explains why he thinks Morse fails in his&nbsp;account of "mitigated free will" as compatible with the science of human behavioral biology.&nbsp; I am now wondering whether the compatibilism that Morse and I share can be defended against Sapolsky's critique.<br /><br />Sapolsky observes that there are three ways of viewing the influence of human biology on human behavior.&nbsp; (1) We have complete free will in our behavior, because our behavior is always freely chosen, and it is never biologically caused.&nbsp; (2) We have no free will, because our behavior is never freely chosen, and it is always biologically caused.&nbsp; (3) Our behavior is somewhere in between these two extremes.<br /><br />Almost no one takes the first position, because almost all of us recognize that sometimes people are compelled by biological causes to behave in ways that we have not freely chosen.&nbsp; So, for example, in 1842, Daniel M'Naghten tried to assassinate British prime minister Robert Peel, and instead he killed Peel's private secretary, Edward Drummond.&nbsp; He had been convinced that the Tories were persecuting him and even trying to murder him.&nbsp; For years, he had heard voices telling him that Peel was spying on him.&nbsp; He felt compelled to kill Peel.&nbsp; At the trial, a doctor testified that he was insane.&nbsp; Today, we would say he suffered from some form of paranoid psychosis.&nbsp; He was declared innocent by reason of insanity, and for the rest of his life he was in insane asylums.&nbsp; His case became the basis of the "M'Naghten rule" that someone can be innocent by reason of insanity if, at the time of the crime, the person is so "laboring under such a defect of reason from disease of the mind," that he cannot distinguish right from wrong.<br /><br />In Anglo-American law, this shows the limits of free will when a diseased mind creates a compulsion that drives someone to commit a crime for which they are not fully responsible.<br /><br />But as our scientific knowledge of the natural causes of behavior grows, Sapolsky observes, we can see that not just brain diseases like&nbsp;this but all human behaviors have natural biological causes.&nbsp; And if all of our behavior is naturally caused, then we don't have free will, because we cannot act outside of the naturally causal world known to natural science.&nbsp; So Sapolsky takes the second position--that there is no free will at all.<br /><br />But Sapolsky admits that most human beings--or at least most of those who have thought deeply about this problem of free will--take the third position--that there is some middle ground between complete free will and no free will.&nbsp; This is the position that the determinism of natural causes can be compatible with a limited free will.&nbsp; <br /><br />Those like Morse (and me) who defend compatibilism claim that human beings can have a natural freedom of choice that is not a free will understood as uncaused cause, and therefore this natural freedom is compatible with the determinism of natural cause.&nbsp; Sapolsky denies this is possible, because he believes that any notion of human freedom must tacitly assume some kind of spiritual or immaterial power acting as uncaused cause.<br /><br />Morse distinguishes between causation and compulsion.&nbsp; The fact that all of our behavior is caused does not mean that all of it is compelled.&nbsp; When we freely choose to think or act, what we do has been caused by our beliefs and desires, but this causation is not compulsion, and so we can be held legally or morally responsible for this.<br /><br />Sapolsky responds: "But try as I might, I cannot see any way of making this distinction that does not tacitly require a homunculus that is outside the causal universe, a homunculus that can be overwhelmed by 'compulsion' but that can and should handle 'causation'" (600).<br /><br />Although the compatibilists deny&nbsp;that they are metaphysical dualists, in fact, they really are, at least implicitly:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"There's the brain--neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, receptors, brain-specific transcription factors, epigenetic effects, gene transpositions during neurogenesis.&nbsp; Aspects of brain function can be influenced by someone's prenatal environment, genes, and hormones, whether their parents were authoritative or their culture egalitarian, whether they witnessed violence in childhood, when they had breakfast.&nbsp; It's the whole shebang, all of this book."</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">"And then, separate from that, in a concrete bunker tucked away in the brain, sits a little man (or woman, or agendered individual), a homunculus at a control panel.&nbsp; The homunculus is made of a mixture of nanochips, old vacuum tubes, crinkly ancient parchment, stalactites of your mother's admonishing voice, streaks of brimstone, rivets made out of gumption.&nbsp; In other words, not squishy biological brain yuck."</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">"And the homunculus sits there controlling behavior.&nbsp; There are some things outside its purview--seizures blow the homunculus's fuses, requiring it to reboot the system and check for damaged files.&nbsp; Same with alcohol, Alzheimer's disease, a severed spinal cord, hypoglycemic shock."</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">"There are domains where the homunculus and that brain biology stuff have worked out a détente--for example, biology is usually automatically regulating your respiration, unless you must take a deep breath before singing an aria, in which case the homunculus briefly overrides the automatic pilot."</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">"But other than that, the homunculus makes decisions.&nbsp; Sure, it takes careful note of all the inputs and information from the brain, checks your hormone levels, skims the neurobiology journals, takes it all under advisement, and then, after reflecting and deliberating, decides what you do.&nbsp; A homunculus in your brain, but not of it, operating independently of the material rules of the universe that constitute modern science" (588).</blockquote>In reply to&nbsp;this<em> reductio ad absurdum</em> argument, Morse and I will say that this is a straw man--or straw homunculus--argument, because we are not claiming that freedom of choice acts outside the causal laws of nature. But Sapolsky's claim is that despite what we say, we must implicitly or tacitly invoke such a homunculus acting outside the natural world.<br /><br />Now, it should be noted that in defending a biological determinism that denies free will, Sapolsky is not a reductionist; nor&nbsp;is he claiming that biological science can predict behavior.&nbsp; His biology of human behavior is a non-reductive multifactorial biology that sees&nbsp;behavior arising from a great multitude of factors interacting with one another, so that no single factor or set of factors acts as the single cause of the behavior.&nbsp; So, for instance, genes influence behavior, but they do not by themselves determine behavior, because genes by themselves do nothing, and their influence depends on the&nbsp;various contexts in which they work.<br /><br />Moreover,&nbsp;since this multifactorial biology is so complex, and since&nbsp;our scientific knowledge of how it works is so limited, we cannot now--and perhaps cannot ever--predict&nbsp;any behavior exactly.&nbsp; We can only talk about what tends to&nbsp;happen <em>on average</em> in certain circumstances<em>.&nbsp; </em>The variability of individuals and the variability of the contexts in which they act make precise prediction impossible.&nbsp; We can say that people with paranoid psychosis will have some tendency to act as M'Naghten did, but he cannot say that every person with such a disease will do so.<br /><br />So, if we were persuaded by Sapolsky that there is no free will or freedom of choice to support the standards of legal responsibility assumed by the criminal justice system today, then how would we have to reform the system to conform to this science of non-reductive multifactorial biological determinism?<br /><br />Sapolsky says we should draw three conclusions--one is easy to see, one is hard to implement, and the third is almost impossible to achieve.<br /><br />First, it should be easy to see that a legal system that denies free will would not have to allow dangerous people to roam freely in society and create havoc.&nbsp; Of course, we need to protect ourselves from dangerous people, even though those dangerous people are acting under the disordered compulsions of their brains.&nbsp; Here Sapolsky's neuroscience would not make any difference for the criminal justice system: we would continue to separate criminals from the rest of society for the protection of society.<br /><br />But, then, the second conclusion is a little harder to adopt:&nbsp; if we deny free will, then we can punish dangerous people by removing them from society, but we cannot see this punishment as <em>justly deserved, </em>as virtuous retribution for their immoral behavior.&nbsp; It should not feel good to punish.&nbsp; We cannot rightly feel that those we punish have earned their punishment.<br /><br />The third conclusion, Sapolsky admits, is perhaps impossible to put into practice.&nbsp; If we deny free will, then we cannot blame people for their bad behavior.&nbsp; But it also follows that we cannot praise them for their good behavior, nor can we feel proud of ourselves for our good behavior.&nbsp; For, if there is no free will, then no one <em>deserves </em>to be either praised or blamed.<br /><br />It will be almost impossible for human beings to accept this.&nbsp; So Sapolsky concedes:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"I can't really imagine how to live your life as if there is no free will.&nbsp; It may never be possible to view ourselves as the sum of our biology.&nbsp; Perhaps we'll have to settle for making sure our homuncular myths are benign, and save the heavy lifting of truly thinking rationally for where it matters--when we judge others harshly" (613).</blockquote>"Our homuncular myths are benign," it seems,&nbsp;when we praise others for their accomplishments, but not when we judge others harshly.<br /><br />It is not clear to me that Sapolsky can consistently deny&nbsp;human freedom of choice.&nbsp; After all, his whole&nbsp;book <em>Behave</em> is<em>&nbsp;</em>an effort to persuade people to freely change the way they think and act--to see how the science of human behavioral biology can help them choose to create a world that is less violent, more peaceful, less vicious, and more virtuous than it is now.&nbsp; He must conclude "that there is hope, that things can change, that we can be changed, that we personally can cause change" (648).<br /><br />"That we can personally cause change"?&nbsp; Well, yes, if we believe that we have the natural freedom to cause change.&nbsp; But not if we believe that we have no such freedom. <br /><br />Presumably, Sapolsky has written his book to try to persuade his readers with his arguments, and if he succeeds, this will change the neural circuitry in their frontal cortex and other parts of their brains in ways that can then exert some causal influence towards changing their behavior.&nbsp; He is not&nbsp;trying to persuade&nbsp;a homunculus who can act as an uncaused cause.&nbsp; Rather, he is&nbsp;trying to persuade&nbsp;those brain mechanisms that have the natural causal power to change behavior.&nbsp; That is not free will.&nbsp; That is the natural human freedom of choice.<br /><em>&nbsp;</em>Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-86814559596514304162017-10-10T16:20:00.001+01:002017-10-13T10:39:35.142+01:00Sapolsky (5): Liberals Are Motivated by Moral Disgust and Fear of DeathIn his <a href="http://www.cc.com/video-clips/49ky74/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah-robert-sapolsky---how-science-influences-culture-and-politics-in--behave----extended-interview">interview</a> on "The Daily Show" with Trevor Noah, Robert Sapolsky showed his liberal bias in how he reports the research on the biological influences on political ideology.&nbsp; It's the same liberal bias that one sees among most of the social psychologists and political scientists reporting this research.&nbsp; That's why Jonathan Haidt has argued that the only way to overcome this liberal bias is to introduce intellectual diversity into the academic world by allowing conservative and libertarian scholars to participate in this research.&nbsp; (I have written a <a href="https://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2014/09/political-diversity-in-social.html">post</a> on Haidt's argument for academic toleration&nbsp;of conservative and libertarian scholars.)<br /><br />Trevor Noah asked Sapolsky to explain his claim that the ideological differences between political progressives and political conservatives reflect deep biological differences in their psychological traits, so that "their brains are wired differently," and Noah wondered whether this led to the "frightening" conclusion that in politics people are no longer making decisions for themselves.&nbsp; Sapolsky responded by saying that this should not be surprising if we recognize that "we're biological organisms," and so, of course, our biological nature is going to influence our political beliefs.<br /><br />Sapolsky then referred to what he called "one of my favorite studies in the whole book."&nbsp; If you put people in a room with a smelly garbage can, they become more socially conservative, in that they are more likely to decide that a social practice that is different from our own is not just different but morally wrong.&nbsp; In his book, he refers to this study on page 453 (n. 44).&nbsp; The title of the article he is citing is "Disgusting Smells Cause Decreased Liking of Gay Men" (Inbar et al. 2011).<br /><br />Sapolsky went on to say that this is part of the research showing that social conservatives on average have a lower threshold for disgust, and the disgust reaction is seen in the activity in the part of the brain called the insula.&nbsp; The insula was originally evolved to react negatively to bad tasting food or bad smells, but then later in our evolution, this brain mechanism for gustatory or olfactory disgust was appropriated for moral disgust: rotten acts create a "bad taste in our mouth."<br /><br />Sapolsky and Noah&nbsp;could then&nbsp;laugh at conservatives for being driven by irrational emotions of disgust, while implying that liberals or progressives are rational people who use their reason to control the emotions that are uncontrolled among conservatives.<br /><br />Liberal bias has introduced two kinds of distortion here.&nbsp; The first is the silence about libertarianism as an alternative to liberalism and conservatism.&nbsp; Sapolsky is silent about the research&nbsp;by Haidt and his colleagues (Iyer et al., 2012) showing that libertarians have a lower threshold for disgust than do either conservatives or liberals, and that libertarians are far more cerebral in their moral judgments.&nbsp; I have pointed this out in the previous post.&nbsp; <br /><br />One might try to defend Sapolsky here by saying that his 10-minute interview with Noah was too short to bring up all the complications in this research.&nbsp; But that defense won't work, because in his book (almost 800 pages long!), Sapolsky devotes only one sentence to libertarianism (446), and it's a curt, and untrue, dismissal of libertarianism as lacking any consistency.<br /><br />The second kind of distortion is the false assumption that liberals are so purely rational that they do not show moral disgust or any other moral emotion.&nbsp; That this is false is evident to anyone who actually reads the article about the smelly garbage can experiment that Sapolsky cites.<br /><br />Here's the abstract for the paper: "An induction of disgust can lead to more negative attitudes toward an entire social group.&nbsp; Participants who were exposed to a noxious ambient odor reported less warmth toward gay men.&nbsp; This effect of disgust was equally strong for political liberals and conservatives, and was specific to attitudes toward gay men--there was only a weak effect of disgust on people's warmth toward lesbians, and no consistent effect on attitudes toward African Americans, the elderly, or a range of political issues" (Inbar et al., 2011, 23).<br /><br />So the effect of disgust toward gay men (relative to heterosexual men) was "equally strong for political liberals and conservatives"!&nbsp; Neither in his television interview nor in his book does Sapolsky mention this, because it would weaken his claim that liberals are not motivated by the moral disgust that motivates conservatives.<br /><br />Now it is true that political liberals are more likely than political conservatives to <em>say </em>that one should not rely on feelings of disgust when making moral judgments (Graham, Haidt, and Nosek, 2009), and it is true that political liberals generally express a higher respect for homosexuals than do political conservatives.&nbsp; But what this experiment with the smelly garbage can suggests is that political liberals can be influenced by the subtle effects of disgust just as conservatives are.&nbsp; And keep in mind that libertarians are probably much less influenced by moral disgust towards homosexuals than are either liberals or conservatives.<br /><br />If one agrees with those social psychologists who have argued that political orientation is deeply influenced by emotional intuitions rooted in evolutionary foundations--perhaps Haidt's six moral foundations--then one should expect that liberals are just as strongly motivated by their emotional intuitions as are conservatives or libertarians (Haidt 2012).&nbsp; Even if one agrees with those like Joshua Greene (2013) who argue that moral judgment shows a complex interaction of intuitive emotion and deliberate reasoning, one would expect that even liberals who claim to be guided by pure reason must be motivated by emotional dispositions.&nbsp; (My series of posts on Greene begin <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-scientific-study-of-moral-emotion.html">here</a>.)<br /><br />So, for example, consider the liberal opposition to genetically modified food (GM)&nbsp;in the United States.&nbsp; Surveys indicate that a majority of Americans are opposed to GM.&nbsp; And of those, most are so absolutely opposed that they say GM should be prohibited <em>regardless of what the evidence might be as to risks and benefits</em>.&nbsp; This is remarkable, especially since there is a scientific consensus that GM is no more risky than food that has not been genetically modified, and the benefits of GM are clear, particularly for the less well off in the developing world.&nbsp; Scott et al. (2016) have shown, from a survey of U.S. representative of the population, that those who are absolutely opposed to GM are more disgust sensitive in general and more disgusted by the consumption of GM than those who are not absolutist in their opposition to GM and those who are supporters.&nbsp; Social liberals and social conservatives are equally motivated by their moral disgust to oppose GM. Scott et al. (2016, 322) explain:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">". . . In the case of GM, we believe that disgust-based moral intuitions are grounded in intuitions about contamination and perceived violations of 'naturalness.'&nbsp; The current data suggest that valuing naturalness is not the exclusive province of the political left or right. . . . We believe those on the left feel more connected to nature, whereas those on the right feel stewardship over the natural world because nature is part of God's creation.&nbsp; If so, liberals may value nature because it is intrinsically part of a moral circle and object to any harm to wild animals or habitats.&nbsp; Conservatives may value nature on theological grounds and object to scientists 'playing God' by disregarding the prescribed relationship between man and the natural world."</blockquote>If this is correct--that liberals and conservatives are equally motivated by moral disgust in their opposition to GM--then Martha Nussbaum (2004) is wrong in her claim that disgust is an "illiberal emotion."<br /><br />Okay, some liberals might say, maybe in our opposition to GM we do allow our disgust reactions to overwhelm our reason, but on most issues our reason rules over our passions, unlike those poor social conservatives who allow their irrational emotions to control all of their moral and political positions.&nbsp; On the contrary, there is evidence that across a wide range of issues, liberals are motivated by moral emotions.<br /><br />The most sacred value for liberals is caring for the victims of oppression and unfairness.&nbsp; Consequently, they think government should intervene in the economy to protect the poor and the weak from being oppressed by the rich and the powerful.&nbsp; This is motivated by moral disgust elicited by what they see as oppressive or unfair conduct.&nbsp; In experimental game theory, studies of how the emotions of disgust are stirred by unfair offers in the Ultimatum Game, and of how this disgust arises in parts of the brain that evolved originally to react against bad food and pathogens, indicate how liberal moral disgust can be understood as an evolved reaction against unfairness and injustice (Sanfey et al., 2003; Rozin et al., 2009; Chapman et al., 2009; Moretti and Pellegrino, 2010).<br /><br />Petrescu and Parkinson (2014) have shown in an experiment that inducing people to feel disgust--by presenting them with pictures designed to induce disgust--causes them to adopt left-wing positions on economic issues.&nbsp; For example, those feeling disgust were more likely to strongly agree with the statement that "government should redistribute income from the better off to those who are less well off."&nbsp; So while conservatives are more likely to be disgusted by violations of physical and spiritual purity, liberals are more likely to be disgusted by violations of economic fairness and equality.<br /><br />Another sacred value for liberals is what Haidt calls the "care/harm foundation."&nbsp; Human beings have an evolved disposition to care for children and protect them from harm, and this&nbsp;supports a general disposition to care for and protect innocent victims of violence.&nbsp; Human beings are thus inclined to feel moral disgust in response to violence that harms the innocent.&nbsp; Sapolsky himself expresses his liberal moral disgust with gun violence in the United States.&nbsp; He explains how the insular cortex activates when someone bites in rancid food, which induces a reflexive spitting out of the food, gagging, and perhaps vomiting.&nbsp; He then explains how the insula also mediates visceral responses to immoral violence:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">". . . this is visceral, not just metaphorically visceral--for example, when I heard about the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, 'feeling sick to my stomach' wasn't a mere figure of speech.&nbsp; When I imagined the reality of the murder of twenty first-graders and the six adults protecting them, I <em>felt </em>nauseous.&nbsp; The insula not only prompts the stomach to purge itself of toxic food; it prompts the stomach to purge the reality of a nightmarish event" (561).</blockquote>Surely, many people have felt the same sickening moral disgust&nbsp;in response to the recent Las Vegas massacre; and many liberals will be motivated by this moral disgust to renew their proposals for tougher gun control laws.&nbsp; To counter this, conservatives will have to make rational arguments about how gun control&nbsp;laws don't work to stop such gun violence and about the importance of the Second Amendment in protecting the right to bear arms, even though this has the unfortunate effect of allowing some disturbed individuals to misuse their guns&nbsp;as Stephen Paddock did.<br /><br />Here's a video of Sapolsky claiming that moral disgust is just bad evolution:<br /><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/BavY9XqOrKA/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BavY9XqOrKA?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div><br /><br />"If it makes you puke, you must rebuke" is Sapolsky's scornful way of characterizing Leon Kass's argument for the "wisdom of repugnance" (454).&nbsp; Or as Sapolsky says, "one day the neurons that help make you puke are suddenly involved in running the president's bioethics panel" (569).&nbsp; He has a great time poking fun at Kass's observation that he finds it repugnant when people display the "catlike activity" of licking ice cream cones in public (445).&nbsp; (Links to my long series of posts on Kass can be found <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2009/06/leon-kass-and-demise-of-council-on.html">here</a>).&nbsp; Even if it's only conservatives like Kass who feel morally disgusted by people who lick ice cream cones in public, there's plenty of evidence that liberals feel morally disgusted by a wide range of conduct that violates the sacred values of liberalism.<br /><br />Social psychologists have also shown through experiments that liberals are motivated by their fear of death to think more like conservatives (Nail et al., 2009).&nbsp; Reminding people of their own mortality and of the 9/11 terrorist attack increased support for President George W. Bush, both among conservatives and among liberals (Landau et al., 2004).&nbsp; This might explain why both liberal and conservative congressmen supported Bush's Patriot Act in 2001 and the American invasions of Afganistan and Iraq.&nbsp; By contrast, libertarians consistently opposed Bush's policies as threatening liberty, perhaps because libertarians feel a great passion for liberty and less fear of death.<br /><br />Sapolsky is either silent about this research, or he is selective in his reporting of it, because it contradicts his story about politics as a battle of the rational liberals against the emotional conservatives.<br /><br />Here's an example of his selective reporting.&nbsp; The article by Nail et al. (2009) is entitled "Threat Causes Liberals to Think Like Conservatives."&nbsp; But Sapolsky's reports it this way:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"Related to this is 'terror-management theory,' which suggests that conservatism is psychologically rooted in a pronounced fear of death; supporting this is the finding that priming people to think about their mortality makes them more conservative" (452).</blockquote>He then observes: "Fear, anxiety, the terror of mortality--it must be a drag being right-wing."<br /><br />He is careful to hide from his readers the fact that liberals have been shown to be motivated by fear of death just like conservatives.<br /><br />Fear, anxiety, the terror of mortality--it must be a drag being either right-wing or left-wing.<br /><br /><br />REFERENCES<br /><br />Chapman, H. A., et al. 2009. "In Bad Taste: Evidence for the Oral Origins of Moral Disgust."&nbsp; <em>Science </em>323: 1222-26.<br /><br />Graham, J., J. Haidt, and B. Nosek. 2009. "Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations." <em>Journal of Personality and Social Psychology </em>96:1029-46.<br /><br />Greene, Joshua. 2013. <em>Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them. </em>New York: Penguin Press.<br /><br />Haidt, Jonathan. 2012. <em>The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.</em> New York: Pantheon Books.<br /><br />Inbar, Yoel, David Al Pizarro, Paul Bloom. 2011. "Disgusting Smells Cause Decreased Liking of Gay Men." <em>Emotion </em>12: 23-27.<br /><br />Iyer, Ravi, et al.&nbsp; 2012. "Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians." <em>PLOS ONE </em>7: e42366.<br /><br />Landau, Mark J., et al. 2004. "Deliver Us From Evil: The Effects of Mortality Salience and Reminders of 9/11 on Support for President George W. Bush." <em>Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin </em>30: 1136-50.<br /><br />Moretti, Laura, and Giuseppe di Pellegrino. 2010. "Disgust Selectively Modulates Reciprocal Fairness in Economic Interactions." <em>Emotion</em> 10: 169-180.<br /><br />Nail, Paul R., et al. 2009. "Threat Causes Liberals to Think Like Conservatives." <em>Journal of Experimental Social Psychology </em>45: 901-907.<br /><br />Nussbaum, Martha. 2004. <em>Hiding From Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law. </em>Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.<br /><br />Petrescu, Dragos C., and Brian Parkinson. 2014. "Incidental Disgust Increases Adherence to Left-Wing Economic Attitudes." <em>Social Justice Research </em>27: 464-86.<br /><br />Rozin, Paul, Jonathan Haidt, and Katrina Fincher. 2009. "From Oral to Moral." <em>Science </em>323: 1179-80.<br /><br />Sanfey, Alan G., et al. 2003. "The Neural Basis of Economic Decision-Making in the Ultimatum Game." <em>Science </em>300: 1755-58.<br /><br />Sapolsky, Robert. 2017. <em>Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. </em>New York: Penguin Press.<br /><br />Scott, Sydney, Yoel Inbar, and Paul Rozin. 2016. "Evidence for Absolute Moral Opposition to Genetically Modified Food in the United States." <em>Perspectives on Psychological Science </em>11: 315-24.Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-31665934125552856962017-10-07T13:14:00.001+01:002017-10-07T14:31:32.300+01:00Sapolsky (4): Left or Right? What about the Libertarians?Robert Sapolsky thinks that our evolved human biology has some influence on our political ideology, in that all of us are born with genetically&nbsp;inclined dispositional preferences that influence our political behavior and our attitudes on specific political issues.&nbsp; Studies of identical twins reared apart show that if you know that one of the twins is politically conservative, you can predict that the other twin is likely to be politically conservative.&nbsp; So it seems that there is some genetic influence on whether one is politically&nbsp;conservative or liberal.&nbsp; Sapolsky's thinking has been shaped by studies of the evolutionary psychology of political orientation by people like Jonathan Haidt, Joshua Greene, and John Hibbing and his colleagues (444-455, 508-512).<br /><br />This suggests two questions.&nbsp; First,&nbsp;what does "genetic influence" mean here?&nbsp; In 2008, the <em>Journal of Politics </em>published an article entitled "Two Genes Predict Voter Turnout," which&nbsp;implied a simple model in which genes directly influence political behavior.&nbsp; In a previous post (<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2015/09/biopolitics-is-better-than-genopolitics.html">here</a>), I have argued that such a simplified genetic model cannot explain or predict the emergent complexity of political animals, due to the individuality, contingency, and historicity of their behavior.&nbsp; Indeed, the failure to replicate the claims in that <em>Journal of Politics </em>article has forced the authors to retract what they said.&nbsp; This supports&nbsp;my argument&nbsp;that the older biopolitics movement is correct in arguing for a complex interactive biopolitical framework that is superior to the simplifying models of genopolitics proposed by Hibbing et al.<br /><br />In fact, over the past five years, Hibbing et al. have moved away from the simplistic model of genopolitics in adopting the complex interactive model of biopolitical theory (see Kevin Smith, Douglas Oxley, Matthew Hibbing, John Alford, and John Hibbing, "Linking Genetics and Political Attitudes: Reconceptualizing Political Ideology," <em>Political Psychology </em>32 [2011]: 369-397).&nbsp; This is the model accepted by Sapolsky, who sees that the genetic influence on human behavior is almost always very indirect and dependent upon a complex interaction of many factors in a specific context (see Sapolsky's citation of Smith et al. at 445, n. 32).<br /><br />Instead of a simplistic model in which genetics directly influence attitudes on specific political issues, Hibbing et al. now propose a complex model that moves through six stages with environmental factors influencing five of these stages.&nbsp; Here are the six stages: (1) genetics, (2) biological systems, (3) cognition/emotion information processing biases, (4) personality&nbsp;and values, (5) ideology, and (6) attitudes on specific political issues.&nbsp; The environment influences stages 2 through 6.&nbsp; Each of these stages has many interacting factors.&nbsp; So, for example, (5) ideology includes not just political ideology but also many other kinds of preferences for religion, educational styles, occupation, styles of art, child rearing, music, leisure pursuits, types of humor, and more.&nbsp; Political ideology is defined as "preferences for bedrock issues of social organization."<br /><br />In effect, Hibbing et al. and Sapolsky have embraced what I have called "biopolitical science," which is a science that moves through three levels of deep history: the natural history of the political species, the cultural history of a political community, and the biographical history of political actors in a community.&nbsp; I have illustrated this by discussing Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation at these three levels.&nbsp; Such a biopolitical science would have to include all of human behavioral biology (as surveyed by Sapolsky in <em>Behave</em>) as well as all of the traditional fields of political science and political history.&nbsp; Hey, I've never said this was going to be easy!&nbsp; This has been the subject of various <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-timidity-of-john-hibbing-and.html">posts</a>.<br /><br />For Hibbing et al., the crucial factor in this complex model is political ideology understood as "preferences for bedrock issues of social organization," which assumes that there are some universal principles of social organization that were shaped in the ancient environments of human evolutionary adaptation, so that the "bedrock issues" are not as transient as the specific political issues that happen to arise at particular points in time for particular communities.&nbsp; So, for example, the current debate in the United States over the Affordable Care Act is a historically unique event in American political history.&nbsp; But underlying this debate, there should be some enduring "bedrock issues" that explain the ideological divisions in this debate, so that liberal Democrats tend to support Obamacare, and conservative Republicans tend to oppose it.<br /><br />This leads to the second question raised by the evolutionary psychology of political orientation: How exactly should we understand the evolutionarily bedrock spectrum of political ideology?&nbsp; Traditionally, American political scientists have mapped the spectrum of political ideology along a single dimension from left to right, liberal to conservative.&nbsp; Although the terminology of "liberal" and "conservative" is in many ways unique to the recent history of American political culture, Hibbing et al. think that this left/right or liberal/conservative dichotomy taps into "bedrock issues of social organization" that could have been shaped by the ancient social evolution of the human species.&nbsp; Sapolsky agrees.<br /><br />But doesn't this give us another implausibly simplistic model that cannot account for the complex diversity of evolved political ideology?&nbsp; Isn't it hard to see how the complexity of political thought and behavior could be reduced to two categories at opposite ends of one dimension--the political left or the political right--or perhaps three categories if we include the political center?&nbsp; At the very least, I will argue, we need to recognize libertarianism (or classical liberalism) as a position that is neither purely liberal nor purely conservative, a position that is ignored by Sapolsky and by Hibbing et al.<br /><br />The political metaphor of "left" and "right" originated in the French Revolution of 1789, when members of the National Assembly divided into supporters of the King and the Church who sat to the right of the President and supporters of the Revolution who sat to his left (see Marcel Gauchet, "Right and Left," in Pierre Nora and Lawrence Kritzman, eds., <em>Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past</em>, vol. 1: <em>Conflicts and Divisions</em>, 241-300 [Columbia University Press, 1996]).<br /><br />Against the claim that this traditional&nbsp;left/right dichotomy is no longer applicable to political debate today, Norberto Bobbio has&nbsp;contended that these terms "left" and "right" are fundamental, in that the left promotes equality, while the right promotes inequality; and this split between those favoring&nbsp;human equality and those favoring human inequality is an enduring political debate, rooted in the experience of human beings as both naturally equal, as members of the same human species, and naturally unequal, as showing individual diversity in their traits and propensities.&nbsp; <br /><br />Bobbio&nbsp;writes: "right and left . . . indicate opposing programs in relation to many problems whose solution is part of everyday political activity.&nbsp; These contrasts concern not only ideas, but also interests and judgments on which direction society should be moving in; they exist in all societies, and it is not apparent how they could disappear" (<em>Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction </em>[University of Chicago Press, 1996], 3.&nbsp; <br /><br />Hibbing et al. quote this passage from Bobbio (Smith et al., 379).&nbsp; But they ignore&nbsp;his point that a full accounting of political ideology requires seeing two dimensions of political thought--not just left/right (or equality/inequality) but also liberty/authoritarianism.&nbsp; Combining these two dimensions, Bobbio claims, creates at least four categories.&nbsp; The extreme left (such as Marxist totalitarianism)&nbsp;represents egalitarian authoritarianism.&nbsp; The moderate left (such as liberal socialism)&nbsp;represents egalitarian libertarianism.&nbsp; The moderate right&nbsp;(such as American and European conservatism) represents antiegalitarian libertarianism.&nbsp; The extreme right&nbsp;(such as Fascism and Nazism) represents antiegalitarian authoritarianism.&nbsp; <br /><br />But notice the incoherence in some of these positions.&nbsp; Egalitarian authoritarianism is self-contradictory.&nbsp; Bobbio admits this when he says that the "egalitarian utopia" of the extreme left&nbsp;"turned into its opposite," when the party vanguard became the new ruling class (82).<br /><br />Notice also that Bobbio does not recognize libertarianism as a distinct position.&nbsp; Similarly, Sapolsky passes over libertarianism quickly with the claim that this cannot be a consistent ideology, because "libertarians are a mixture of social liberalism and economic conservatism" (447), and because he agrees with Hibbing et al. that liberalism and conservatism are the only consistent ideologies.&nbsp; Neither Sapolsky nor Hibbing et al. respond to the claim of libertarians that they are fully consistent in the commitment to liberty--both economic liberty and personal liberty--while liberals and conservatives are self-contradictory in accepting one form of liberty but not the other, so that liberals and conservatives are partly libertarian and partly authoritarian.<br /><br />The insistence of Sapolsky and Hibbing et al. that everyone is either liberal or conservative, left or right, requires that everyone be forced to make dichotomous choices about the "bedrock issues of social organization."&nbsp; Hibbing et al. have done this by using a "Society Works Best Instrument" (Smith et al., 390-91).&nbsp; People are given a series of 14 binary choices about how "Society works best when . . ."&nbsp; Amazingly, they ask about how "society" works best, but they ask nothing about "government" or "the state"; and so they make it impossible to distinguish between the natural and voluntary associations in civil society and the coercive power of government.<br /><br />Here are some examples.&nbsp; "Society works best when . . . 1. Those who break the rules are punished. 2. Those who break the rules are forgiven.&nbsp; 1. Every member contributes. 2. More fortunate members sacrifice to help others.&nbsp; 1. People are rewarded according to merit.&nbsp; 2. People are rewarded according to need.&nbsp; 1. People take primary responsibility for their welfare. 2. People join together to help others.&nbsp; 1. People are proud they belong to the best society there is.&nbsp; 2. People realize that no society is better than any other."<br /><br />Every choice of a 1 was given a score of 1, and every choice of a 2 was given a score of -1.&nbsp; Those whose total score was close to 14 were extreme conservatives.&nbsp; Those whose total score was close to -14 were extreme liberals.<br /><br />I assure you I am not making this up.&nbsp; This is what Hibbing et al. regard as real social science.&nbsp; <br /><br />Wouldn't any reasonable person object that most of these dichotomous choices are ridiculous, because they are false dichotomies?&nbsp; Those who break the rules should always be punished and never forgiven?&nbsp; Or they should always be forgiven and never punished?&nbsp; People should always be rewarded according to merit and never according to need?&nbsp; Or people should always be rewarded according to need and never according to merit?&nbsp; People should always take primary responsibility for their welfare and never help others?&nbsp; Or people&nbsp;should always help others and never take primary responsibility for their own welfare?&nbsp; <br /><br />If you insist that political ideology consists of a choice between only two alternatives, these are the kind of silly choices that you have to give to people.&nbsp; Remarkably, Sapolsky&nbsp; endorses this nonsense.<br /><br />Perhaps we need a somewhat wider range of choices.&nbsp; Sapolsky and Hibbing et al. are silent about the proposal by some political scientists--such as William Maddox and Stuart Lilie (in <em>Beyond Liberal and Conservative: Reassessing the Political Spectrum </em>[Cato Institute, 1984])--for using the two dimensions of freedom--economic freedom and personal freedom--to construct a matrix of four or five political ideologies.&nbsp; American public opinion survey data shows, they contend, that American citizens are not just divided into liberals and conservatives, but also into libertarians and populists.&nbsp; Some libertarian theorists (such as David Boaz), as well as the&nbsp;Libertarian Party, have adopted this analysis to construct&nbsp;a matrix of political ideologies based on two dimensions--personal liberty and economic liberty:<br /><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VTvAnu6-HTE/WdeuNl45qVI/AAAAAAAABFM/p3t2ku7c4qwWwwb8HvS-gfr03R8QUwuCgCLcBGAs/s1600/politicalquizmatrix.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="328" data-original-width="381" height="274" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VTvAnu6-HTE/WdeuNl45qVI/AAAAAAAABFM/p3t2ku7c4qwWwwb8HvS-gfr03R8QUwuCgCLcBGAs/s320/politicalquizmatrix.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br />You can take a short <a href="https://www.theadvocates.org/quiz/quiz.php">quiz</a> to see where you belong.&nbsp; If you score high on personal liberty but low on economic liberty, you're a liberal.&nbsp; If you score how on personal liberty but high on economic liberty, you're a conservative.&nbsp;If you score low on both personal liberty and economic liberty, you're a statist (or an authoritarian).&nbsp; (Maddox and Lilie would call you a populist.)&nbsp;&nbsp; If you score high on both personal liberty and economic liberty, you're a libertarian.&nbsp; If you score towards the middle on both scales, you're a centrist.<br /><br />Someone like Bobbio might object that constructing this matrix based on two dimensions of liberty ignores the dimension of equality that separates the egalitarian left and the antiegalitarian right.&nbsp; But the libertarian could respond by arguing that using the two dimensions of liberty does not deny equality if equality is understood as equal liberty rather than equal results.&nbsp; Classical liberals have always understood the natural equality of human beings as the condition of being born "equally free and independent" (in the words of the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776): we are equally free from being ruled over by others without our consent.&nbsp; But this equal liberty will always lead to unequal results, in that there will be some inequality of property, social status, personal achievement, and general success in life.&nbsp; If equality is understood as equal results, then the egalitarian left will have to use governmental coercion to force an equality of outcomes, which is an authoritarian denial of liberty that will also be a denial of equality insofar as authoritarian rulers will have superior power over those they coerce.<br /><br />Bobbio recognizes this problem in speaking about the egalitarian authoritarianism of the extreme left, but he does not explicitly recognize that even the moderate left is at least partly authoritarian in denying economic liberty.&nbsp; And while Sapolsky tends to identify authoritarianism with the right wing, he does recognize, in at least one passage, the left-wing authoritarianism in the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution (468).<br /><br />And yet even if libertarianism can be defended as a consistent political ideology in&nbsp;its consistent devotion to freedom, we still might wonder whether libertarianism can be understood as rooted in evolved human nature.&nbsp; Haidt's evolutionary moral psychology makes a plausible case for the libertarian principle of liberty as one of six moral foundations shaped in human evolutionary history.<br /><br />I have written a long series of posts on Haidt.&nbsp; The posts <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2012/09/jonathan-haidts-darwinian-conservatism.html">here</a> and <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2016/10/socialism-and-human-nature-cosmides.html">here</a> include links to some of the others.<br /><br />Originally, Haidt argued for five moral foundations in human nature: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.&nbsp; Liberals tend to stress the first two.&nbsp; Conservatives tend to stress the last three.&nbsp; But then libertarians complained to Haidt that they had no place in this scheme.&nbsp; Beginning in 2011, Haidt began to survey libertarian attitudes, and he decided that he needed a sixth moral foundation--liberty/oppression--that libertarians tended to stress.&nbsp; (See Ravi Iyer, S. Koleva, J. Graham, P. Ditto, and J. Haidt, "Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians," PLoS ONE 7 (2012): e42366.)<br /><br />Here's a video of Haidt lecturing at the Cato Institute on libertarian moral psychology:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe width="320" height="266" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/RvBTa3N32yo/0.jpg" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RvBTa3N32yo?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></div><br /><br />To explain the evolutionary roots of liberty and the resistance to oppression as a moral foundation, Haidt relies on Christopher Boehm's theory of how human ancestors in hunter-gatherer bands used social pressure and punishment to keep bullies and ambitious people from exercising exploitative dominance over society.&nbsp; This is what John Locke saw as the equal liberty of human beings in the state of nature: not that human beings were completely equal in every way, because there will always be some high status people who will try to dominate others, but that human beings are naturally inclined to resist being oppressed by those who seek some dominance.<br /><br />Haidt is best known for his theory of moral disgust--the idea that what originally evolved as a visceral disgust with bad food could evolve into a moral disgust with bad people or bad conduct.&nbsp; Conservatives have a high sensitivity for feeling disgust, and this underlies their principles of loyalty, authority, and sanctity:&nbsp; conservatives are disgusted by people they see as betraying their country, disobeying authority, or desecrating sacred values.&nbsp; Liberals have a low sensitivity for feeling disgust, which allows them to tolerate a lot of conduct that conservatives condemn--homosexuality for example.&nbsp; Sapolsky makes a lot of this (453-55), because like Hibbing et al. he wants to be able to scorn conservatives as people whose moral and political judgments are driven by crude emotional and visceral reactions, as opposed to liberals who are so rational in controlling their emotions and showing tolerance for unconventional behavior and ideas.&nbsp; But in doing this, Sapolsky is silent about Haidt's report that libertarians show the lowest sensitivity to disgust and the highest rationality in their judgments.&nbsp; Libertarians are highly emotional only in showing the emotions of "reactance"--that is, emotions of resistance to those who threaten their individual freedom.<br /><br />Sapolsky is also silent about how Haidt has shown that most social scientists and psychologists are liberals who display a liberal bias in their research, and therefore Haidt has argued for allowing more conservatives and libertarians to become professors in order to achieve some intellectual balance.&nbsp; I have written about that <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2014/09/political-diversity-in-social.html">here.</a><br /><br />One of the signs of liberal academic bias is that researchers studying political ideology often show a remarkable ignorance of conservative and libertarian thought.&nbsp; For example, it has long been assumed in this research that all of those people who are not liberals show the "authoritarian personality."&nbsp; This ignores the fact that modern conservatism has been a largely <em>liberal </em>or <em>libertarian </em>conservatism, because it has been a fusion of&nbsp;traditionalist conservatism and classical liberalism.&nbsp; So, for example, the illiberal conservatism of Joseph de Maistre has almost no supporters today among modern conservatives.&nbsp; Consequently, most conservatives today think it is important for society to enforce moral and religious virtue in civil society, but they don't think this should be coercively enforced by government.&nbsp; <br /><br />Even Haidt often misses this in his studies of conservative moral disgust.&nbsp; He will ask conservatives about their disgust for homosexuality, for example, and he then reports that they do indeed feel such disgust.&nbsp; But he doesn't ask them whether they think homosexuality should be a capital crime, as it often was in many legal systems in the past, and continues to be in some legal systems today.&nbsp; If he were to ask this, he would see that conservatives today do not think that such coercive punishment by government should be inflicted on homosexuals.&nbsp; He might even discover that many conservatives are beginning to accept the legalization of homosexual marriage, although they still want the freedom to condemn homosexual marriage in their churches, their families, and their other voluntary associations.&nbsp; This is their way of combining political liberty and social virtue.<br /><br />But at least Haidt shows a much broader understanding of conservatism and libertarianism than is the case for those like Sapolsky and Hibbing et al. who show a blinding liberal bias.&nbsp; This is manifest in Haidt's moral matrices for liberalism, conservatism, and libertarianism.&nbsp; Here are his three figures from <em>The Righteous Mind</em>.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Xo4E8xXRlZk/Wdi70bHFZNI/AAAAAAAABFk/tYbbZpnEE-gjTX-HmrKNdbIso8UEN99HQCLcBGAs/s1600/HaidtLiberalMoralMatrix.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="319" data-original-width="544" height="187" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Xo4E8xXRlZk/Wdi70bHFZNI/AAAAAAAABFk/tYbbZpnEE-gjTX-HmrKNdbIso8UEN99HQCLcBGAs/s320/HaidtLiberalMoralMatrix.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BwTvfEhAO14/Wdi779_mbGI/AAAAAAAABFo/1VkLSncEzuszooJ7nNGqhnzPffeNeBu5ACLcBGAs/s1600/HaidtConservativeMoralMatrix.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="884" data-original-width="1474" height="191" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BwTvfEhAO14/Wdi779_mbGI/AAAAAAAABFo/1VkLSncEzuszooJ7nNGqhnzPffeNeBu5ACLcBGAs/s320/HaidtConservativeMoralMatrix.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zV6mAkB8Ckg/Wdi8CKtjE7I/AAAAAAAABFs/NNJ4WrX7Y8Y06HL7MqvWkf7ggtW-ALSPwCLcBGAs/s1600/HaidtLibertarianMoralMatrix.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="275" data-original-width="442" height="199" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zV6mAkB8Ckg/Wdi8CKtjE7I/AAAAAAAABFs/NNJ4WrX7Y8Y06HL7MqvWkf7ggtW-ALSPwCLcBGAs/s320/HaidtLibertarianMoralMatrix.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br />For each moral matrix, the six lines connect the moral thought to the six moral foundations.&nbsp; The thickness of the lines represent the thickness of the commitment to those foundations.&nbsp; So, liberals show their strongest commitment to care/harm, a strong commitment to liberty/oppression and fairness/cheating, and only a very weak commitment to the other three foundations.&nbsp; <br /><br />Social conservatives show an almost equal commitment to all&nbsp;six moral foundations, which is why Haidt often says that conservatives have a broader matrix than do liberals.&nbsp; Consequently, conservatives are better at understanding liberals than liberals are at understanding conservatives.<br /><br />The libertarian moral matrix shows a predominant commitment to liberty/oppression, a somewhat strong commitment to fairness/cheating, and much weaker commitments to the other four foundations.<br /><br />Notice that of the six moral foundations, liberty is the only one that has a strong commitment in all three moral matrices.&nbsp; Is this because liberty provides the common conditions for these moral matrices to coexist in the same society?&nbsp; If so, does that justify the preeminence that libertarians give to liberty as the ground of any good society?<br /><br />The libertarian moral matrix might seem to be the most narrow of the three.&nbsp; But one should notice that the questions in Haidt's surveys asked about the importance of these six foundations, without asking about the compulsory or voluntary enforcement of these foundations.&nbsp; Libertarians would probably recognize the importance of loyalty, authority, and sanctity as moral principles, <em>as long as they are voluntarily enforced</em>, <em>and thus free from coercion</em>.<br /><br />Here, again, Haidt misses the libertarian&nbsp;fusion of political liberty and social virtue, which rests on the crucial distinction between state and society.<br /><br />Sapolsky also misses this when he criticizes conservatives for being "more concerned with 'binding foundations' like loyalty, authority, and sanctity, often stepping-stones to right-wing authoritarianism and social-dominance orientation," and when he praises liberals for having "more refined moral foundations, having jettisoned the less important, more historically damaging ones that conservatives perseverate on" (450).&nbsp; Sapolsky doesn't recognize that what made the moral foundations of loyalty, authority, and sanctity "historically damaging" was the enforcement of these through coercive violence, and that the libertarian principle of voluntarism allows people to freely&nbsp;commit themselves to&nbsp;the morality of these binding foundations without impeding the equal freedom of others who disagree with them.<br /><br />Sapolsky's liberal bias is evident in his interview on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah <a href="http://www.cc.com/video-clips/49ky74/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah-robert-sapolsky---how-science-influences-culture-and-politics-in--behave----extended-interview">here.</a>&nbsp; Sapolsky is happy to join with Noah in ridiculing conservative Republicans as people whose ideology arises from their disgust reaction to bad smells!&nbsp; He says nothing about libertarians.Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-18574097702502542252017-09-30T15:47:00.000+01:002017-10-04T19:58:39.635+01:00Sapolsky (3): The "Spirit Level" Debate over Inequality and HealthOne of the weakest parts of Robert Sapolsky's <em>Behave </em>is his claim that economic inequality necessarily causes bad physical, mental, and social health, even in societies where poverty has been largely abolished.&nbsp; The problem is that he relies on the research of Richard Wilkinson and a few others who argue for this position without acknowledging that many critics have pointed out flaws in this research, which one can see in the debate over the book coauthored by Wilkinson and Kate Pickett--<em>The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger.&nbsp; </em>This book was first published in 2009, and it became an international bestseller.&nbsp; It provoked many critical responses, including two books: Christopher Snowdon's <em>The Spirit Level Delusion </em>(2010) and Peter Saunders' <em>Beware False Prophets </em>(2010).&nbsp; (Saunders' book can be found <a href="https://www.cis.org.au/publications/cis-special-publications/when-prophecy-fails/">here</a>.&nbsp; The Epilogue to the second edition of Snowdon's book can be found <a href="http://www.velvetgloveironfist.com/pdfs/SpiritLevelDelusion_Chapter10.pdf">here</a>.)&nbsp; In the paperback edition of their book, Wilkinson and Pickett added a "Postscript," in which they attempted to answer their critics.&nbsp; A longer version of their reply to critics can be found <a href="https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/sites/all/themes/equalitytrust/images/responses-to-all-critics.pdf">here</a>.&nbsp; Remarkably, Sapolsky is completely silent about this debate.<br /><br />Sapolsky is also silent about the political implications of this debate.&nbsp; The apparent failure of the Marxist economies and the apparent success of the capitalist economies at the end of the 20th century had had a dispiriting effect on the Left.&nbsp; Marx's prediction that the impoverishment of the proletariat in capitalist societies must necessarily lead to revolution had proven false, because capitalism was raising the standard of living for all classes, while socialism was failing.&nbsp; But then Wilkinson and Pickett seemed to show that capitalism was ruining human life by creating high levels of economic inequality, so that while <em>absolute</em> poverty was disappearing,<em> relative</em> poverty was rising: those people living low-status lives <em>felt </em>poor, because they saw that others with higher status had so much more, and the chronic stress from this feeling of relative poverty made people sick.&nbsp; Moreover, this sickness from inequality created lots of social problems: not only higher rates of disease and reduced life expectancy but also higher rates of crime, mental illness, social distrust, obesity, poor educational performance, teenage births, and high rates of imprisonment.&nbsp; Capitalist inequality was making everyone desperately unhappy, and the only solution was socialist programs for creating greater equality through redistribution of the wealth and welfare state policies.&nbsp; Thomas Piketty and others have elaborated this argument about the corrosive effects of capitalist inequality.&nbsp; This has given new life to the Left.<br /><br />As I indicated in my previous post, Sapolsky's distinctive contribution to this lefty critique of capitalist inequality is his evolutionary explanation of inequality as the necessary consequence of the move from an egalitarian state of nature for hunter-gatherers to a hierarchical dominance structure in societies based on an agricultural mode of production; and from this he draws the conclusion that it is impossible to restore equality in modern societies that cannot go back to hunter-gatherer life, which means that no socialist policies can ever succeed in overturning inequality and its corrosive effects on human health.<br /><br />Unlike Sapolsky, I do not see any clear scientific support for Wilkinson's theory of the inequality/health relationship--particularly, the idea that inequality is inherently harmful to human health because of the chronic stress that it creates for low-status people, <em>even in the absence of real poverty.&nbsp; </em>The flimsiness of the empirical evidence for this theory is evident in the debate over Wilkinson and Pickett's <em>Spirit Level</em>.<br /><br />Sapolsky's assertion that "numerous studies" support this theory, as if there were a general consensus among researchers about this, is not true (441).&nbsp; Wilkinson and Pickett say that "there are around 200 papers in peer-reviewed academic journals testing the relationship between income inequality and health in many different settings" (279).&nbsp; But if you check the footnote for this assertion, you will see that they are citing one of their own papers (Wilkinson and Pickett, "Income Inequality and Population Health: A Review and Explanation of the Evidence," <em>Social Science &amp; Medicine </em>62 [2006]: 1768-1784).&nbsp; If you read their paper, you will see that they survey 169 results from 155 studies on inequality and wealth; and of these, they identify 88 as supportive of their theory and 81 as either unsupportive or "mixed" in their results.<br /><br />One of the best surveys of this research is by Andrew Leigh, Christopher Jencks, and Timothy Smeeding ("Health and Economic Inequality," in W. Salverda, B. Nolan, and T. Smeeding, eds., <em>The Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality </em>[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], 384-405).&nbsp; It's available <a href="http://andrewleigh.org/pdf/HealthInequalityOUP.pdf">online.</a>&nbsp; They conclude that "the empirical evidence for such a relationship [between inequality and health] in rich countries is weak.&nbsp; A few high-quality studies find that inequality is negatively correlated with population health, but the preponderance of evidence suggests that the relationship between income inequality and health is either non-existent or too fragile to show up in a robustly estimated panel specification.&nbsp; The best cross-national studies now uniformly fail to find a statistically reliable relationship between economic inequality and longevity.&nbsp; Comparisons of American states yield more equivocal evidence."<br /><br />The popular appeal of Wilkinson and Pickett's book comes from their graphs that apparently show a statistical correlation between economic inequality and bad health across 23 nations.&nbsp; (A few of these graphs can be seen <a href="https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/resources/the-spirit-level">online).</a>&nbsp; For example, here is a graph that seems to show that life expectancy is longer in more equal rich nations.&nbsp; This graph is easier to see at the online location, where it is figure #17.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MCQy3QkXSwo/Wc6fgKexMVI/AAAAAAAABEE/zoY-L5dxCZQtAlCuTLuQ5uYKrqUz6DjpgCLcBGAs/s1600/WilkinsonSpiritLevel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1024" height="240" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MCQy3QkXSwo/Wc6fgKexMVI/AAAAAAAABEE/zoY-L5dxCZQtAlCuTLuQ5uYKrqUz6DjpgCLcBGAs/s320/WilkinsonSpiritLevel.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br />This is typical for most of the graphs.&nbsp; It's a simple linear regression model with the level of income inequality in the nations on the x axis for the explanatory variable&nbsp;and level of health (in this case, life expectancy in years) on the y axis for the dependent variable.&nbsp; A best-fit line is drawn through the scatter points of data to indicate the trend.&nbsp; In this case, the declining trend line shows life expectancy declining with rising income inequality.&nbsp; This downward sloping line depends mostly on the relatively high life expectancy in Japan and Sweden and the relatively low life expectancy in the USA and Portugal.<br /><br />The data for this graph is from the 2004 United Nations Human Development Report.&nbsp; A reader who notices this might wonder why they used the 2004 report when the 2005 and 2006 reports were available to them, and actually they do use the 2006 report elsewhere in their book.&nbsp; They even use the 2006 report for its life expectancy data in another graph (compare pages 7 and 82&nbsp;in their book).<br /><br />Christopher Snowdon has shown that if Wilkinson and Pickett had used the 2006 report for their data, the graph would have looked like this:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-UB_JXC7UNXI/Wc90TL2hLXI/AAAAAAAABEc/PiKV8eddQvM5-bXVx8K2L-DDom5IEig0wCLcBGAs/s1600/SnowdenSpiritLevelGraph.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="264" data-original-width="400" height="211" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-UB_JXC7UNXI/Wc90TL2hLXI/AAAAAAAABEc/PiKV8eddQvM5-bXVx8K2L-DDom5IEig0wCLcBGAs/s320/SnowdenSpiritLevelGraph.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><em>&nbsp;</em><br />A larger picture of this graph can be found <a href="http://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.com/2010/05/graphs-and-sources.html">here.</a><br /><br />Now the trend line is going up!&nbsp; If they had used the 2009 report for their data, the trend line would again be going up.&nbsp; So here increasing income inequality is slightly correlated with increasing life expectancy.&nbsp; <br /><br />Now you should notice that Snowdon has added Hong Kong, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic, which were excluded by Wilkinson and Pickett.&nbsp; Hong Kong shows that a very wealthy but less equal society can have high life expectancy.&nbsp; Slovenia and the Czech Republic show that more equal but less wealthy societies tend to have low life expectancy.<br /><br />So the trend line here will slope down or up depending on one's selection of the data points.&nbsp; Wilkinson and Pickett selected data points that would give them a downward sloping line, while Snowdon selected data points to give him an upward sloping line.&nbsp; At least Snowdon points this out to his readers, while Wilkinson and Pickett hide this from their readers.<br /><br />But let's say that we accept Wilkinson and Pickett's graph as showing us a correlation between less equal societies and lower life expectancy.&nbsp; What exactly does this tell us?&nbsp; If we remember the common saying that correlation is not causation, then we see that this graph by itself tells us nothing about causation, although Wilkinson and Pickett want their readers to assume that it does show that inequality causes low life expectancy.<br /><br />Moreover, Wilkinson and Pickett never follow the common practice in the statistics of correlation of testing for alternative explanations that might be confounding variables.&nbsp; For example, if we compare Japan (the most equal society) and Hong Kong (the least equal society), we would have to notice that despite their great differences in income inequality, they tend to perform about the same not only in life expectancy but also in many other respects.&nbsp; Is this perhaps explained by their similarity in their Asian culture?&nbsp; Wilkinson and Pickett never consider this possibility because they never consider any alternative explanation beyond income inequality.<br /><br />In the Postscript to their book, Wilkinson and Pickett explain their failure to test for alternative explanations: "including factors that are unrelated to inequality, or to any particular problem, would simply create unnecessary 'noise' and be methodologically incorrect" (285).&nbsp; Since they assume that inequality must be the only explanation, any other possible explanation is to them "unnecessary 'noise'"!<br /><br />Actually, of course, just glancing at their data might suggest many alternative explanations.&nbsp; Consider, for example, <em>freedom </em>as measured by the Human Freedom Index, which has been the subject of a <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2016/12/human-progress-6-measuring-evolution-of.html">post.</a>&nbsp; Most of the countries with high life expectancy rank in the top 15 of the Human Freedom Index: such as Switzerland (2), Canada (6), Australia (6), and Sweden (15).&nbsp; The one exception is Japan (32).&nbsp; Is it possible that greater freedom has something to do with higher life expectancy?<br /><br />Wilkinson and Pickett point to the Scandinavian countries as setting the standard for how egalitarian societies can promote human health and happiness.&nbsp; But they ignore the fact that these countries generally score high on both the Economic Freedom Index and the Human Freedom Index (combining economic freedom and personal freedom).&nbsp; As I have argued in other posts <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2014/06/nordic-social-democracy-as-capitalist.html">here</a> and <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2016/12/human-progress-6-measuring-evolution-of.html">here,</a> the Nordic social democracies are not purely socialist, because they are actually capitalist welfare states.<br /><br />Here's another graph from Wilkinson and Pickett:<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GKfQRlLkfHg/Wc-QOKkN1MI/AAAAAAAABE0/hKRW8wfyaH8lQXA8MRteAIiV_UecmT1pACLcBGAs/s1600/SpiritLevelHomicideGraph.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1024" height="240" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GKfQRlLkfHg/Wc-QOKkN1MI/AAAAAAAABE0/hKRW8wfyaH8lQXA8MRteAIiV_UecmT1pACLcBGAs/s320/SpiritLevelHomicideGraph.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br />This seems to show that homicide rates are higher in more unequal rich countries.&nbsp; But notice that the upward slope of the line depends entirely on the USA as an outlier.&nbsp; It is standard statistical practice to throw out outliers to avoid creating spurious correlations.&nbsp; Wilkinson and Pickett do not do this, because taking out the USA here would create a graph with no correlation between inequality and homicide, which is contrary to the result they want to find.&nbsp; They say nothing about the high rate of gun ownership in the US as a possible explanation for high homicide rates in the US.&nbsp; But they do mention gun ownership in their attempt to explain away the high homicide rate for Finland, which is a more equal country, and the low homicide rate for Singapore, which is a less equal country.&nbsp; "In the United Nations International Study on Firearm Regulation," they observe,&nbsp;"Finland had the highest proportion of households with guns, and Singapore had the lowest rate of gun ownership" (136).<br /><br />One might notice another problem in these graphs from Wilkinson and Pickett's book.&nbsp; Inequality is measured by inequality in <em>income</em>.&nbsp; Is this the best standard?&nbsp; Is it possible that in countries with extremely high income tax rates--like the Scandinavian countries--people will be motivated to hide their true income or accumulate wealth in forms other than income?&nbsp; If so, then measuring inequality by income inequality will tend to make countries with high income taxes appear more equal than they really are.<br /><br />Actually, as Snowdon points out, Wilkinson and Pickett use at least five different measures of inequality in their book, which allows them to change the measures to achieve whatever results they want to find.&nbsp; For example, on page 239, they compare the incomes of the top 10% and the bottom 10% in the US and UK, which shows that "both countries experienced very dramatic rises in inequality which peaked in the early 1990s and have changed rather little since then."&nbsp; But on page 296 they want to show that inequality peaked just before the financial crisis of 2008, and to achieve this result, they measure inequality through the share of wealth held by the top 1%.&nbsp; This is the only place in the book where they use this as the measure of inequality.&nbsp;&nbsp;They don't use this measure elsewhere in the book, because by this measure Norway and Denmark are less equal than the USA, and so using this as the measure of inequality would not give them the results they're looking for.<br /><br />Wilkinson and Pickett admit that there is&nbsp;at least one social problem that is more common in more equal countries--suicide.&nbsp; To explain this, they suggest: "suicide is often inversely related to homicide.&nbsp; There seems to be something in the psychological cliché that anger sometimes goes in and sometimes goes out: do you blame yourself or others for things that go wrong?&nbsp; In Chapter 3 we noted the rise in the tendency to blame the outside world--defensive narcissism--and the contrasts between the US and Japan"&nbsp;(175).&nbsp; So, you see, in the less equal countries, when people are unhappy, they are inclined to kill other people; but in the more equal countries, unhappy people have the decency to kill themselves rather than others!<br /><br />Wilkinson and Pickett recognize that "social integration" is important for human health: "It's not just social status and psychological wellbeing that affects our health.&nbsp; The relationships we have with other people matter too. . . . Having friends, being married, belonging to a religious group or other association and having people who will provide support, are all protective of health" (76).&nbsp; But then they are silent about the possibility that people&nbsp; with low social status but high social integration might show good health and happiness.<br /><br />As I have indicated in a previous <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2015/09/empirical-evidence-for-thomistic.html">post,</a> Charles Murray (in <em>Coming Apart</em>) has shown that people in the white underclass in America can be very happy if they are married, if they find satisfaction in their work, if they live in places where neighbors help one another, and if they are active religious believers.&nbsp; Contrary to what is suggested by Wilkinson, Pickett, and Sapolsky, low social status need not by itself make people unhealthy and unhappy.&nbsp; <br /><br />My defense of "good inequality" can be found <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2016/01/good-inequality.html">here,</a> <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2016/09/new-evidence-of-good-inequality-in.html">here,</a> and <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2016/12/human-progress-4-life-shows-more.html">here.</a><br /><br />Here is a video of a debate between Wilkinson, Pickett, Saunders, and Snowdon.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/SqiKULsBzHU/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SqiKULsBzHU?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div><br /><br />Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-82841686889138023742017-09-27T16:29:00.000+01:002017-09-27T20:49:24.887+01:00Sapolsky (2): Is Inequality Making Us Sick?Like Rousseau, Robert Sapolsky believes that the biggest mistake human beings have ever made was in leaving the egalitarian life in the state of nature and entering the agrarian societies where inequality was invented.&nbsp; That inequality--in which people are ranked by their social status from high to low--makes us all physically, psychologically, and socially sick.&nbsp; <br /><br />In animals with dominance hierarchies, an animal's rank in that hierarchy can greatly influence its physical and mental health.&nbsp; The most commonly studied physiological effect of social status is the response to stress, as shown in the blood level of glucocorticoids (GCs), adrenal steroid hormones that are secreted during stress, such as cortisol or hydrocortisone in primates.&nbsp; GCs help to mediate adaptation to short-term physical stressors, such as the fight-or-flight response to an attacking animal, but GCs become pathogenic when they are secreted chronically, such as when animals are exposed to frequent social stressors because of their ranking in a hierarchy.<br /><br />Is it more stressful to be dominant or subordinate?&nbsp; In the 1950s, researchers talked about "executive stress syndrome"--the idea that those at the top suffer from the stressful burdens of their responsibilities.&nbsp; Sapolsky thinks this has been mostly refuted by research showing that those at the top of a hierarchy who have a sense of control, but who are not directly responsible for supervising many subordinates, benefit from reduced stress.&nbsp; By contrast, those in middle management, who are responsible for supervising many people under them, but who have little ultimate control, are more exposed to chronic stress.<br /><br />Early in his career, Sapolsky argued that being subordinate was far more stressful than being dominant.&nbsp; He became famous for showing that the low-ranking baboons that he observed in Kenya showed the bad health consequences of chronic stress, and he suggested that this might also be true for low-ranking human beings.<br /><br />Later, however, he conceded that things were more complicated--that whether low-ranking or high-ranking individuals experienced the most stress depended on variable social conditions and individual personality traits (<em>Behave, </em>435-42; Sapolsky, "The Influence of Social Hierarchy on Primate Health," <em>Science </em>308 [29 April 2005]: 648-52).&nbsp; For example, when the maintenance of a despotic hierarchy requires that the alpha male frequently engages in physical reassertion of dominance, the dominant individual will experience the most stress.&nbsp; But if the alpha male can maintain his dominance by social intimidation (a threatening stare) without violent aggression, then it's the subordinate individual who experiences the most stress.&nbsp; If the hierarchy is stable, the dominant individual is less stressed, and the subordinate individual is more stressed.&nbsp; If the hierarchy is unstable, it's the dominant individual who is more stressed.&nbsp; If the dominants have a personality that make them skillful at exerting social control while being sociable with others, while the subordinates have a personality that make them poor at coping with their subordination and finding support from others, then the subordinates will be more stressed.<br /><br />Among human beings, Sapolsky argues, the suffering of those in the low status positions does not necessarily come from their being desperately poor, because even in those prosperous societies where there is almost no poverty, the people with low status still suffer from being less well off than those ranked above them.&nbsp; Their suffering comes not so much from <em>being </em>poor as from <em>feeling </em>poor.&nbsp; What counts is not <em>absolute</em> poverty but <em>relative</em> poverty.&nbsp; Even in prosperous societies that have abolished absolute poverty, because almost everyone enjoys&nbsp;an abundant&nbsp;level of economic resources for a materially comfortable life, those who have less than others suffer from the psychosocial stress of living a low-status life.&nbsp; Even those in high status positions suffer from the social maladies caused by inequality--including high crime, low levels of social trust, and a futile pursuit of happiness through competitive consumerism.&nbsp; As Sapolsky puts it, everyone is unhappy because "marked inequality makes people crummier to one another" (<em>Behave, </em>292).<br /><br />In surveying the evidence for these conclusions, Sapolsky relies on the work of many researchers, but he particularly stresses the "crucial work by the social epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson of the University of Nottingham" (<em>Behave, </em>294).&nbsp; Wilkinson argues that a comparative analysis of the international data for socioeconomic conditions shows that the more economically unequal societies suffer far more from bad health and social maladies than do the more equal societies.&nbsp; He contends that social welfare programs for redistributing wealth to achieve more equality--as has been done, for example, in the Scandinavian social democracies--will make life better for all.<br /><br />Remarkably, Sapolsky does not share Wilkinson's belief that socialist or welfare-state policies can alleviate the suffering from inequality.&nbsp; Sapolsky observes:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"The SES/health gradient is ubiquitous.&nbsp; Regardless of gender, age, or race. With or without universal health care.&nbsp; In societies that are ethnically homogeneous and those rife with ethnic tensions.&nbsp; In societies in which the central mythology is a capitalist credo of 'Living well is the best revenge' and those in which it is a socialist anthem of 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.'&nbsp; When humans invented material inequality, they came up with a way of subjugating the low ranking like nothing ever before seen in the primate world" (<em>Behave, </em>442).</blockquote>So if Sapolsky thinks that neither capitalism nor socialism can overturn the oppressive inequality invented in the move from foraging bands to agrarian societies, then does he think we should look for some way to return to the&nbsp;egalitarian state of nature?&nbsp; No, he dismisses that as a ridiculous idea.&nbsp; He quotes Lawrence Keeley as expressing "a pretty weird worry" in writing: "The doctrines of the pacified past unequivocally imply that the only answer to the 'mighty scourge of war' is a return to tribal conditions and the destruction of all civilization."&nbsp; "In other words," Sapolsky remarks, "unless this tomfoolery of archaeologists pacifying the past stops, people will throw away their antibiotics and microwaves, do some scarification rituals, and switch to loincloths--and where will that live us?" (<em>Behave</em>, 315).<br /><br />Sapolsky identifies himself as a lefty.&nbsp; But while he shows the lefty lament for the evils of inequality, he lacks the lefty optimism about overcoming that inequality through a collectivist egalitarianism.<br /><br />I must say that I find it hard to take seriously this leftish moaning about the devastating effects of any social inequality for those who suffer so from a low-status ranking that they can never live a happy life.&nbsp; I am not even sure that Sapolsky really believes what he says about this.<br /><br />Consider the following remarks by Sapolsky:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">". . . in humans, there is a robust imperviousness of SES-health associations to differences in social and economic systems. . . . it is a testimony to the power of humans, after inventing material technology and the unequal distribution of its spoils, to corrosively subordinate its have-nots" ("Social Hierarchy," 652).</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">"As with other species, human quality of life also varies with the consequences of rank inequalities--there's a big difference between the powerful getting seated at a restaurant before you and the powerful getting to behead you if the fancy strikes them. . . ."</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">"We belong to multiple hierarchies&nbsp;and can have very different ranks in them.&nbsp; Naturally, this invites rationalization and system justification--deciding why hierarchies where we flounder are crap and the one where we reign really counts."</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">"Implicit in being part of multiple hierarchies is their potential overlap.&nbsp; Consider socioeconomic status, which encompasses both local and global hierarchies.&nbsp; I'm doing great socioeconomically--my car's fancier than yours.&nbsp; I'm doing terribly--I'm not richer than Bill Gates."</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">"An example of this [membership in multiple hierarchies] that I found to be excruciatingly uncomfortable: I used to play in a regular pickup soccer game at Stanford.&nbsp; I was terrible, which was widely and tolerantly recognized by all.&nbsp; One of the best, most respected players was a Guatemalan guy who happened to be a janitor in my building.&nbsp; At soccer he'd call me Robert (on the rare occasions when anything I did was relevant to play).&nbsp; And when he came to empty the garbage from my office and lab, no matter how much I tried to get him to stop, it would be 'Dr. Sapolsky'"&nbsp;<em>(Behave</em>, 431).</blockquote>Now I&nbsp;don't think that the Guatemalan guy must necessarily be a desperately&nbsp;unhappy man suffering from stress-related disorders because he happens to be in a low-status job.&nbsp; If his&nbsp;janitorial job is secure, if he's a&nbsp;successfully married man with a family, if he has good friends, if he lives&nbsp;in a good neighborhood, and if he's an active member of his church--if his life has&nbsp;such conditions for a good life--then he's living a happy life.&nbsp; And it&nbsp;does make a big difference that he lives in a liberal social and economic order, where even though&nbsp;Stanford professors have higher status than he does, they are not permitted to behead him if they so choose.<br /><br />And I don't think Sapolsky really thinks he's doing terribly--as a well-paid Stanford professor--because he's not richer than Bill Gates.<br /><br />I think both Sapolsky and the Guatemalan are living much happier lives in a liberal capitalist society that allows for inequality of social status than they would in an illiberal socialist society.<br /><br />I have surveyed some of the global empirical evidence for this claim in my series of posts on "human progress through the liberal Enlightenment" in November and December of 2016.Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-35365884233185533712017-09-21T13:33:00.003+01:002017-09-21T14:03:14.216+01:00Sapolsky on the State of Nature: Hobbes or Rousseau? Why Not Locke?The question of whether the original state of nature for human beings in foraging bands was a state of war or a state of peace has been a contentious question in the history of political philosophy, beginning with Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.&nbsp; This continues today to be one of the most intensely&nbsp; debated questions in the social and biological sciences, with some people (such as Richard Wrangham, Azar Gat, and Steven Pinker) adopting the Hobbesian view of the state of nature as a state of war, and others (such as Douglas Fry, Brian Ferguson, and Robert Sussman) adopting the Rousseauian view of the state of nature as a state of peace.&nbsp; Remarkably, however, these folks never recognize the Lockean alternative--that the state of nature is predominantly a state of peace that easily becomes a state of war--even though they often end up agreeing implicitly with this Lockean view.&nbsp; <br /><br />Weighing the evidence and arguments in this debate supports the conclusion that Hobbes was partly right, Rousseau was mostly wrong, and Locke was mostly right.&nbsp; I have argued for this assessment in various posts (<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2013/08/neither-hobbes-nor-rousseau-lockean-way.html">here,</a> <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-behavioral-ecology-of-chimpanzee.html">here,</a> and <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2015/06/azar-gat-on-war-in-state-of-nature.html">here).</a>&nbsp; <br /><br />It is surprising to see how this modern debate repeats the same pattern over and over again.&nbsp; First, it's assumed that the only choice is between Hobbes and Rousseau.&nbsp; Then, some people try to argue for the Hobbesian position, and others try to argue for the Rousseauian position.&nbsp; And yet, eventually most agree that neither extreme position is completely right.&nbsp; But they cannot recognize the Lockean position as superior to both, because they haven't thought about Locke's argument, or how the evidence gathered by modern scientists might confirm what Locke says.<br /><br />So, for example, much of the debate over the past 20 years was initiated by Lawrence Keeley in <em>War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage </em>(1996).&nbsp; He frames the debate as a choice between Hobbes and Rousseau (5-32).&nbsp; And, as the subtitle of his book indicates, he seems to take the side of Hobbes against Rousseau.&nbsp; But then he concedes that neither Hobbes nor Rousseau got it right: "If Rousseau's primitive golden age is imaginary, Hobbes's perpetual donnybrook is impossible" (178).&nbsp; And yet he never considers the possibility that the archaeological and anthropological evidence that he surveys in his book could be seen as supporting Locke's position as mostly right.<br /><br />One can see the same pattern repeated in the debate sparked by Steven Pinker's <em>The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined </em>(2011).&nbsp; In a report on this debate in <em>Science, </em>the author says that the debate is rooted in the dispute between Hobbes and Rousseau; and he identifies some scholars as Hobbesians and others as Rousseauians (Andrew Lawler, "The Battle Over Violence," <em>Science </em>336 [2012]: 829-30).&nbsp; But then he reports that most scholars agree that neither Hobbes nor Rousseau are completely right.&nbsp; "They do not argue for a Rousseauian perspective. But that doesn't mean they're ready to embrace a Hobbesian view, either" (830).&nbsp; The reader is left wondering whether there is some third alternative that is closer to the truth.<br /><br />I see this pattern again in Robert Sapolsky's new book <em>Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst </em>(2017).&nbsp; Sapolsky is a primatologist (particularly, a baboonologist) and neuroscientist at Stanford University, who is famous on the Stanford campus for his popular lecture courses, and also famous around the world for his lectures on YouTube from his course "Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology" that have attracted over a million views.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NNnIGh9g6fA/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/NNnIGh9g6fA?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div><br /><br />I first heard him lecture at Stanford in 1988 when I was auditing courses in the Program in Human Biology.&nbsp; Now, in his new book, we have a massive (790 pages in small print!) <em>magnum opus </em>that brings together much of his thinking from that human behavioral biology course.&nbsp; The book also has the casual hipster wit&nbsp;that makes his lecturing so engaging for students.&nbsp; <br /><br />Sapolsky's book is a comprehensive textbook surveying all of the work over the past forty years--since the publication in 1975 of E. O. Wilson's <em>Sociobiology</em>--on the biological bases of social behavior.&nbsp; Like his teacher Melvin Konner, Sapolsky explains behavior as arising from a complicated interaction of many biological, psychological, and cultural factors, in which&nbsp;every single factor exercises&nbsp;some causal power only in the context of all the other factors.&nbsp; He is particularly interested in explaining social cooperation (humans at our best) and violent aggression&nbsp;(humans at our worst).<br /><br />Explaining the deep evolutionary roots of human violence leads him into the debate over whether&nbsp;warfare&nbsp;is rooted in the evolved human nature of our&nbsp;ancient nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors, or whether war is a relatively recent cultural invention that began&nbsp;only a few thousand years ago when human beings moved into sedentary agricultural societies ruled by militaristic states.&nbsp; <br /><br />Here he&nbsp;follows the&nbsp;recurrent pattern in this debate that I have just sketched.&nbsp; He says the debate is "Hobbes-versus-Rousseau" (305-27).&nbsp; He generally takes the side of the Rousseauians--particularly, Douglas Fry--in criticizing the Hobbesians (Keeley, Pinker, Wrangham, Napoleon Chagnon, and others).&nbsp; And he tells the story of how a baboon troop that he studied in Kenya experienced a change in their social culture, so that they became less aggressive and more peaceful, less Hobbesian and more Rousseauian, which shows the cultural flexibility emphasized by the Rousseauians.&nbsp; But then he concedes that neither Hobbes nor Rousseau got it completely right.&nbsp; "So, Hobbes or Rousseau? Well, a mixture of the two, I say unhelpfully" (325).&nbsp; He never mentions Locke or considers whether a Lockean account of the state of nature might be best.<br /><br />In reviewing Sapolsky's book for the <em>New York Times Book Review</em>, Richard Wrangham generally <a href="https://nyti.ms/2uNp2Gx">praised</a> the book.&nbsp; But he also criticized Sapolsky for becoming a "partisan critic" in his account of the Hobbes-versus-Rousseau debate over the evolution of human violence.&nbsp; Sapolsky's Rousseauian partisanship is subtle in that it depends mostly on his remaining silent about evidence and argumentation that contradict the Rousseauian claims.&nbsp; For example, he endorses Marshall Sahlins' claim that nomadic&nbsp; hunter-gatherers were "the original affluent society" (317-18).&nbsp; But he is silent about the anthropologists who have shown&nbsp; that Sahlins' argument is not supported by the evidence, which I have indicated in a <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-natural-desire-for-complete-and.html">previous post.</a><br /><br />Similarly, Sapolsky relies on the research of Douglas Fry to support the conclusion that nomadic hunter-gatherers have always been peaceful (322).&nbsp; But Sapolsky is silent about the many criticisms of Fry's reasoning, which I have surveyed in a <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-mps-in-galapagos-11-wrangham-on.html">previous post.</a>&nbsp; For example, Fry has failed to recognize that many of the modern hunter-gatherer bands that he has identified as peaceful have been surrounded by militarily superior farmers, and so it's hardly surprising that the hunter-gatherers have not gone to war in such circumstances.<br /><br />Sapolsky says that there is no archaeological evidence for warfare among Paleolithic hunter-gatherers.&nbsp; There is, however, one recently discovered site in northern Kenya dated at around 10,000 years ago&nbsp;that had the skeletons of 27 people killed in a massacre.&nbsp; Sapolsky says that this is not evidence for ancient warfare among <em>nomadic</em> hunter-gatherers, because the victims here seem to have been <em>sedentary </em>hunter-gatherers, who were living along the shoreline of Lake Turkana, where there was probably abundant fish and game animals; and so the attackers wanted to steal this "prime beachfront property" (321).&nbsp; <br /><br />Sapolsky does not tell the reader that the discoverers of this site could not agree on this.&nbsp; As I indicated in a <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2016/01/a-prehistoric-massacre-in-africa.html">previous post,</a> one member of the team accepted the interpretation repeated by Sapolsky--that this is evidence for ancient warfare arising among sedentary hunter-gatherers, who were no longer living a nomadic life.&nbsp; But another member of the team&nbsp;had a different interpretation.&nbsp; She said that while there is lots of evidence of warfare "among settled, sedentary communities," the discovery in Nataruk is the first "archaeological record of armed conflict between early nomadic hunter-gather groups."&nbsp; She suggested that the foragers who were massacred had not established a settlement on the lake, but rather they were a&nbsp;"small traveling band of hunter-gatherers who stopped by a lagoon to hunt or fish."&nbsp; And so, she seemed to adopt the Hobbesian interpretation of this archaeological discovery as confirming that warfare was prevalent among our earliest foraging ancestors, and thus deeply rooted in our evolved human nature.<br /><br />But no matter which interpretation one accepts, this confirms Locke's claim that our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in a state of peace that easily became a state of war whenever there was any resource worth fighting over--like a good fishing spot.<br /><br />Sapolsky seems to agree with this when he says that even purely nomadic hunter-gatherers "are no tie-dyed pacifists," because they often engage in lethal violence (323).&nbsp; If so, then Sapolsky's account of the state of nature is neither Hobbesian nor Rousseauian but Lockean.<br /><br />But what about Sapolsky's baboons, who showed, he argued, that even if their evolved nature is Hobbesian, they can develop a social culture that taps into their "inner Rousseau"?&nbsp; I have written a <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2013/08/how-hobbesian-baboons-find-their-inner.html">post</a> on Sapolsky's earlier reports of this in 2004 and 2013.&nbsp; In his new book, he emphasizes the great "flexibility" and "social plasticity" that this shows in baboon life, which sounds like what Rousseau identified as the "perfectibility" of human ancestors, so that nature put no limits on how far human beings could be transformed by cultural history.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4ESguQgu6Sg/WcO4gotgn5I/AAAAAAAABDs/K8T5xrW9YE4a_N8fBRXfJSFBMJmS3paqwCLcBGAs/s1600/Sapolsky_180.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="239" data-original-width="180" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4ESguQgu6Sg/WcO4gotgn5I/AAAAAAAABDs/K8T5xrW9YE4a_N8fBRXfJSFBMJmS3paqwCLcBGAs/s1600/Sapolsky_180.jpg" /></a></div><br /><br />In the earlier reports, however, Sapolsky suggested that baboon "perfectibility" is not unlimited.&nbsp; The changes brought by cultural history are "within the limits of baboon sociality," and the new culture of Forest Troop did not bring "an unrecognizably different utopia."&nbsp; There was still a dominance hierarchy.&nbsp; There was still displacement aggression, although it had been reduced.&nbsp; And while the rate of reconciliations had increased, the need for reconciliations showed the persistence of conflict.&nbsp; Sapolsky even indicated that the overall rate of aggressive conflict in Forest Troop was similar to other troops.&nbsp; So despite the cultural malleability shown here, "there are not infinite amounts of social plasticity in a primate social system."<br /><br />I have argued that we see three levels of social order in these baboons--baboon nature, baboon culture, and baboon individuals.&nbsp; The repertoire of social behavior characteristic of a baboon species sets the natural limits of baboon sociality.&nbsp; This baboon nature constrains but does not determine baboon culture.&nbsp; And, finally, nature and culture constrain but do not determine individual behavior.<br /><br />I will be writing more posts on Sapolsky's book.<br /><br />Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-59106488428048965252017-09-14T15:32:00.000+01:002017-09-17T12:56:51.875+01:00Is There a Culturally Evolved Prejudice against Atheists as Immoral?Can we be good without God?&nbsp; If not, should we fear atheism as promoting immorality?&nbsp; Is atheism contrary to our evolved natural desire for religious belief?&nbsp; <br /><br />I have written about this in a <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2014/12/did-cultural-evolution-of-big-gods-make.html">previous post</a>, which includes links to other posts.<br /><br />Now we have new research by Will Gervais and his colleagues indicating that people around the world have a culturally evolved prejudice against atheists (Gervais et al., "Global Evidence of Extreme Intuitive Moral Prejudice against Atheists," <em>Nature Human Behaviour </em>1 (2017): 1-5).<br /><br />Here's the abstract:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"Mounting-evidence supports long-standing claims that religions can extend cooperative networks.&nbsp; However, religious prosociality may have a strongly parochial component.&nbsp; Moreover, aspects of religion may promote or exacerbate conflict with those outside a given religious group, promoting regional violence, intergroup conflict, and tacit prejudice against non-believers.&nbsp; Anti-atheist prejudice--a growing concern in secular societies--affects employment, elections, family life, and broader social inclusion.&nbsp; Preliminary work in the United States suggests that anti-atheist prejudice stems, in part, from deeply rooted intuitions about religion's putatively necessary role in morality.&nbsp; However, the cross-cultural prevalence and magnitude--as well as intracultural demographic stability--of such intuitions, as manifested in intuitive associations of immorality with atheists, remain unclear.&nbsp; Here, we quantify moral distrust of atheists by applying well-tested measures in a large global same (<em>N = </em>3,256; 13 diverse countries). Consistent with cultural evolutionary theories of religion and morality, people in most--but not all--of these countries viewed extreme moral violations as representative of atheists.&nbsp; Notably, anti-atheist prejudice was evident even among atheist participants around the world.&nbsp; The results contrast with recent polls that do not find self-reported moral prejudice against atheists in highly secular countries, and imply that the recent rise in secularism in Western countries has not overwritten intuitive anti-atheist prejudice.&nbsp; Entrenched moral suspicion of atheists suggests that religion's powerful influence on moral judgments persists, even among non-believers in secular societies."</blockquote>Their sample was drawn from 13 countries on 5 continents, which included highly secular societies (for&nbsp; example, Netherlands, Finland, and China) and&nbsp;highly religious societies (for example, United Arab Emirates, Mauritius, and India) with diverse religious histories (including countries with Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and secular majorities).<br /><br />Gervais, Ara Norenzayan, and their colleagues have defended a cultural evolutionary model of religion--arguing that the transition from small foraging bands to large agrarian states required extended cooperation of strangers that was made possible by the emergence of religions with moralistic Big Gods, who enforced social cooperation by rewarding the good and punishing the bad in an afterlife.&nbsp; People who live in large cities need to have norms enforced among strangers by third party punishment, and God is the ultimate third party punisher.&nbsp; This most recent research was to test one of the predictions from this theory--that human beings around the world should have an intuitive fear of atheists as immoral.<br /><br />In this research, participants were asked about this scenario:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"<em>When a man was young, he began inflicting harm on animals. It started with just pulling the wings off flies, but eventually progressed to torturing stray cats and other animals in his neighborhood."</em></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">"<em>As an adult, the man found that he&nbsp;did not get much thrill from harming animals, so he began hurting people instead.&nbsp; He has killed 5 homeless people that he abducted from poor neighborhoods in his home city.&nbsp; Their dismembered bodies ae currently buried in his basement."</em></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">"Which is more probable?</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">"1. The man is a teacher.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">"2 (a). The man is a&nbsp;teacher and does not believe in any gods.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">"2 (b).&nbsp;The man&nbsp;is a teacher and is a religious believer."</blockquote>Half of the participants were given 2 (a), and&nbsp;the other half were given 2 (b).&nbsp; They were also given other kinds of questions to distract them from noticing that this was an experiment to test for stereotyping and prejudice.<br /><br />In asking the participants to judge probability, bias is indicated&nbsp;if they commit the "conjunction fallacy."&nbsp; The conjunction rule for the&nbsp;qualitative law of probability states that the probability of a conjunction--the probability of&nbsp;1 and 2--cannot exceed the probability of its constituents--the probability of&nbsp;1 or 2.&nbsp;&nbsp; (That so many people commit the conjunction fallacy was seen by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman as an example of the illogical heuristics of the human mind.)&nbsp; If the participanats&nbsp;cannot see that the man being a teacher is more probable than the conjunction, they are showing an illogical bias--a bias either against atheists or against religious believers.<br /><br />The results showed a greater prejudice against atheists than against religious believers: there was an overall conjunction error rate probability of 0.58 for atheist targets, but only 0.30 for religious targets.&nbsp; So, people were roughly twice as likely to view extreme immorality--being a murderous psychopath--as representative of atheists relative to believers.<br /><br />The most surprising result was that even people who identified themselves as atheists showed this same prejudice against atheists&nbsp;as being&nbsp;inclined to extreme immorality!<br /><br />There is one anomaly in this research, however, that is left unexplained.&nbsp; Of the 13 countries represented in this study, Finland and New Zealand do not show any bias against atheists.&nbsp; For Finland, the atheist error rate is .28, and the religious error rate is .26.&nbsp; For New Zealand, the atheist error rate is .38, and the religious error rate is .29.&nbsp; Finland shows no bias, and New Zealand very little.&nbsp; So what goes here?&nbsp; Are the people of Finland and New Zealand just better in understanding the logic of probability?&nbsp; Or are they unusual in being free of the global prejudice against atheists?<br /><br />So is it really unfair to assume that atheism promotes immorality?&nbsp; The answer from Gervais and his colleagues is complicated.&nbsp; On the one hand, their evolutionary theory of moralistic religion as necessary for securing large-scale cooperation beginning with the Neolithic transition to agrarian states assumes that religious belief does support morality.&nbsp; On the other hand, they say that the intragroup cooperation secured by religious belief also promotes distrust of those outside the group, so that religious believers are thrown into conflict with those who do not share their religious beliefs, as shown by religious persecution and religious wars.<br /><br />Moreover, they argue that as modern societies become ever more secularized, we can see the religious support for morality as a ladder that can be kicked away once we have climbed to the top.&nbsp; We can see this in highly secularized societies like Denmark and the Scandinavian countries that are highly cooperative and peaceful, although fervent religious belief has almost completely disappeared.&nbsp; We can explain this as showing how morality can evolve from natural moral sentiments without any necessity for religious belief in a moralistic God.<br /><br />And yet their research suggests that even in many highly secularized societies, there is still some bias towards believing that morality requires religious belief; and so cultural evolution away from this might be slow.&nbsp; Norenzayan has suggested an analogy to the cultural evolution of literacy.&nbsp; For 99% of human evolutionary history, humans have had oral language, and so learning to speak is naturally easy for them.&nbsp; But writing is a relatively recent invention, and for most of its history, writing and reading were restricted to a small educated elite.&nbsp; Only in the past two centuries, has modern education spread literacy to the great majority of human beings around the world.&nbsp; Similarly, he suggests, religious morality has been central to our cultural evolution for thousands of years, and it is only recently that secular morality has begun to prevail in some societies.&nbsp; We might expect this evolutionary trend to eventually prevail.<br /><br />As an example of this evolutionary trend, consider a point that came up in my posts on Tom West's book on the American Founding--the debate over religious tests for holding public offices.&nbsp; One way for legally enforcing religious morality&nbsp;is to have a religious test for public office.&nbsp; Originally, all of the state constitutions except for Virginia and New York had such tests.&nbsp; For example, members of the Pennsylvania state legislature had to swear: "I do believe in one God, the creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good and punisher of the wicked, and I do acknowledge the scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration."<br /><br />The argument for religious tests was that religion supports morality.&nbsp; A speaker at the Massachusetts convention for ratifying the U.S. Constitution condemned the "no religious test" clause of the Constitution: he argued that no religious tests "would admit deists, atheists, etc., into the general government; and, people being apt to imitate the examples of the court, these principles would be disseminated, and, of course, a corruption of morals ensue."&nbsp; So here we see the very prejudice against atheists detected by Gervais and his colleagues.<br /><br />But why then did the founders at the Constitutional Convention vote unanimously and without any controversy for "no religious tests" in the Constitution?&nbsp; And why did all of the states with religious tests abolish them during the founding period, thus following the example of the national constitution?<br /><br />To explain this, West says that Chris Beneke "rightly notes" that in "founding America . . . libertarian principles . . . repeatedly triumphed over local prejudices and discriminatory laws."<br /><br />So now it seems that the "founding consensus" turned to "libertarian principles" dictating that the legal enforcement of religious belief is not necessary to avoid a corruption of morals.&nbsp; Is this an example of the cultural evolution towards secularized morality expected by Gervais and Norenzayan?<br /><br />Do we lose anything in moving from religious morality to secular morality?&nbsp; West thinks that the American founders thought that something would be lost.&nbsp; In Kantian language, secular morality is a morality of <em>hypothetical imperatives</em>, while religious morality is a morality of <em>categorical imperatives.</em>&nbsp; A religious morality allows us to see natural rights as sacred.&nbsp; A secular morality allows us only to see those natural rights as conducive to the pursuit of happiness.&nbsp; The sacredness of God-given rights is lost in the move to secularized natural rights as&nbsp;instrumental for human happiness (West, <em>The Political Theory of the American Founding</em>, 95).<br /><br />Michael Egnor seems to be making the same point in his <a href="https://evolutionnews.org/2017/09/on-atheism-and-morality-study-confirms-voltaire/">response</a> (published by the Discovery Institute's "Evolution News") to the debate over Gervais' article.&nbsp;(Egnor is a neurosurgeon who teaches at Stony Brook University.) &nbsp;Can you be good without God?&nbsp; Egnor's answer is that you cannot be good if God doesn't exist; but if God does exist, you can be good <em>even if you don't believe God exists</em>.<br /><br />If God exists, Egnor explains, then as Moral Lawgiver, He can provide the cosmic transcendent standards of good and evil.&nbsp; And insofar as that Moral Law is a natural law "written in our hearts" (Romans 2:15), atheists can intuitively feel the transcendent weight of that Moral Law, even though they deny the divine source of that Law.<br /><br />But if God does not exist, as the atheists say, then there can be no such thing as good and evil.&nbsp; There are only human opinions about what serves human welfare, about what we happen to like.&nbsp; But what we like or dislike gives us only hypothetical imperatives about what serves the needs of human nature, human culture, and human individuals.&nbsp; This cannot give us the categorical imperatives woven into the cosmic order by the Moral Lawgiver.<br /><br />I have defended the hypothetical imperatives of natural goodness <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2010/03/philippa-foot-and-hypothetical.html">here</a> and <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2014/07/olsens-criticisms-naturalistic-fallacy.html">here.</a>&nbsp; All natural law reasoning depends on hypothetical imperatives that have a "given/if/then" structure: <em>Given </em>what we know about the nature of human beings and the world in which they live, <em>if </em>we want to pursue happiness while living in society with each other, <em>then </em>we ought to adopt a social structure that conforms to human nature in promoting human happiness in society.&nbsp; So, for example, <em>given </em>what we know about human vulnerability and human propensities to violent aggression, <em>if </em>we want to pursue happiness, peace, and prosperity in our society, <em>then</em> we ought to have laws against murder, rape, assault,&nbsp;and theft.&nbsp; Consequently, the laws against murder, rape, assault,&nbsp;and theft are natural laws.<br /><br />The biblical theist will say that this natural law has been "written in our hearts" by God.&nbsp; The atheist will say that this natural law belongs to our evolved human nature.<br /><br />Although Egnor criticizes the atheist for not recognizing the metaphysical ground of morality in God's command, Egnor seems to concede that as a practical matter, this intellectual mistake does not prevent the atheist from living a morally good life.Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-9083260338951106732017-09-05T16:03:00.000+01:002017-09-28T18:09:41.182+01:00Trump and the Political ScientistsBeyond my participation on a panel on Tom West's book on the American founding, my main goal at the convention of the American Political Science Association in San Francisco was to attend as many of the panels on Donald Trump as I could, so that I could hear what the political scientists are saying about his surprising electoral victory and his unusual presidency.&nbsp; <br /><br />The fact that most political scientists failed to predict&nbsp;Trump's victory is embarrassing for the profession, and so it's not surprising that there were many panels on Trump that attracted large audiences.&nbsp; Two of the panels I attended had over 150 people in the audience, which must be at least&nbsp;four or five times the average attendance for panels.<br /><br />The panels sponsored by the Claremont Institute were generally dominated by right-wing pro-Trump supporters.&nbsp; The panels sponsored by organized sections of the APSA were generally dominated by left-wing empirical political scientists who were anti-Trump.<br /><br />There were three kinds of questions raised at these panels.&nbsp; First, who voted for Trump, and why did they do so?&nbsp; Second, how did the Trump voters prevail in the election?&nbsp; Third, if Trump&nbsp;is judged unfit to be President, is there any constitutional means to remove him from office?<br /><br />To the second question, the obvious answer is the Electoral College.&nbsp; Despite losing the popular vote, Trump won in the Electoral College.&nbsp; Why?&nbsp; Some political scientists suggested that what this shows is that the Electoral College increases the weight of the white voters and voters in rural areas who voted for Trump.&nbsp; One can argue that this is not what was intended by the&nbsp;framers of the Constitution, who hoped that the Electoral College could prevent the election of demagogues like Trump.&nbsp; The Constitution says that "Each state shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature therefore may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress."&nbsp; Many state legislatures have chosen to bind the electors to vote for their party's nominee, and the selection of electors is by a "winner-take-all" principle, so that the candidate with the most popular votes in a state wins all of the electors of that state.&nbsp; This creates a weighting of votes that favored Trump over Clinton.&nbsp; Clinton lost overwhelmingly in white and rural areas of some key states (like Wisconsin) that led to her defeat in the Electoral College, despite that fact that she led in the popular vote total by almost 3 million votes.<br /><br />Unless one believes that rural white voters deserve to have their votes weigh more than the votes of urban non-white voters, one has to wonder about how to change this.&nbsp; One way to do this could be carried out by the state legislatures.&nbsp; They could legislate that all the Electoral College votes of the state would be allocated to the winner of the national popular vote.&nbsp; Or they could legislate that the Electoral College votes of the state would be divided up proportionally to the popular vote, so that it would no longer be "winner-take-all."&nbsp; Another way, of course, would be to amend the Constitution to abolish the Electoral College.<br /><br />To the third question, there are three possible answers.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;If Trump is clearly unfit--morally and intellectually--to be President, then the Congress could impeach him, or the threat of impeachment could persuade him to resign, or he could be declared (under the 25th Amendment) to be "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office" by the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet.&nbsp; If the Vice President and the Cabinet were to declare Trump unable to fill his office, but Trump disagreed, then a 2/3 vote of each House of Congress would be required to up the judgment of disability.<br /><br />According to some interpretations of the impeachment power of Congress, the 25th Amendment (ratified in 1967) was unnecessary, because the Congress's impeachment power&nbsp;was intended to allow the Congress to remove a President judged to be unfit to fill the presidential office.&nbsp; <br /><br />At the APSA convention, John Yoo made this argument&nbsp;on one of the Claremont panels.&nbsp; Yoo made the same points that were summarized a few months ago by Greg Weiner in an <a href="https://nyti.ms/2rwfuhA">op-ed article</a>&nbsp;in <em>The New York Times</em>.&nbsp; According to the Constitution, impeachment applies to "Treason, Bribery, or other high&nbsp;Crimes and Misdemeanors."&nbsp; It has been commonly assumed that "high Crimes and Misdemeanors" means that&nbsp;only criminal acts by the President are impeachable.&nbsp; And thus, we now have a lot of discussion about whether Trump has committed a criminal "obstruction of justice," for which he could be impeached.&nbsp; But as Yoo and Weiner have argued, persuasively&nbsp;I think, this mistakenly sees impeachment as&nbsp;a <em>legal</em> judgment rather than a <em>political</em> judgment.<em>&nbsp; </em>As Hamilton indicated in <em>Federalist</em> Number 65, impeachment applies to offenses "of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they related chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself."&nbsp; At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Madison explained the purpose of impeachment, saying "that some provision should be made for defending the community against the incapacity, negligence or perfidy of the Chief Magistrate."&nbsp; If the Congress judges Trump unfit to be President, the Congress should impeach him, because his unfitness will&nbsp;inflict a&nbsp;great injury&nbsp;on the American community.<br /><br />The first question--who voted for Trump and why--elicited a variety of answers at the convention.&nbsp; Most of the people on the Claremont panels answered with Trump's own rhetorical answer to that question:&nbsp; the country is divided by a battle between the interests of the Ruling Elites (including Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives) and the interests of The People, and Trump is on the side of The People.&nbsp;&nbsp;Of course, this&nbsp;is the usual rhetoric of the demagogic populist who contrasts the "people"--the virtuous majority of the community--with powerful elites and minority groups who aggrandize themselves at the expense of the people.<br /><br />The obvious problem with this simple dichotomy--The Elites versus The People--is that The People is divided between Trump opponents and Trump supporters, and Trump's loss of the popular vote and his unpopularity today indicate that his opponents outnumber his supporters.&nbsp; When I made this point in the question and answer period for one of the Claremont panels, I did not hear a clear answer.&nbsp; The only answer I can think of is that the Trump opponents among the People have been fooled into sacrificing their own interests in serving the interests of the Elites and minority groups.<br /><br />Unlike the Claremont political scientists, the empirical political scientists think that the political sociology and psychology of Trump's supporters cannot be explained with a simple dichotomy of Elites versus the People, because the interests of the People are diverse.&nbsp; Here is where I see the political sociology and psychology of evolved human nature.&nbsp; The 20 natural desires include the desires for social status, political rule, and property.&nbsp; Most of the explanations of Trump's supporters by the empirical political scientists depended on one of those three natural desires.<br /><br />Carson Holloway presented a paper on how Aristotle's account in the <em>Politics </em>(book 5) of the sources of factional conflict in a regime might explain Trump's appeal.&nbsp; At the most general level, Aristotle claims, factional conflict arises from disputes over equality and inequality: some people engage in factional conflict because they aim at equality, and they think they have less than they deserve, because others have aggrandized themselves unfairly; and other people engage in factional conflict because they aim at inequality, thinking that they deserve to be above others.&nbsp; <br /><br />According to Aristotle, this battle over equality and inequality is commonly over either profit or honor: factional conflict arises when people think they have less wealth or honor than they deserve.&nbsp; This can be seen in Trump's rhetoric, Holloway observes, in that he criticizes the American Elites for taking more wealth and honor than they deserve, and he promises that he will overturn this unfair inequality by increasing the economic wealth and social status of the People and reducing the unfair privileges of the Elites.<br /><br />Are the Trump supporters motivated by economic issues?&nbsp; Are they mostly members of a white working class who are economically disadvantaged?&nbsp; Trump's rhetoric about creating and protecting jobs for the working class suggests this.&nbsp; But some of the political scientists doubted that Trumpism can be explained by economic interests.&nbsp; Most of those who voted for Trump are in the top 50% of Americans in income.&nbsp; And in average income black Americans are generally much worse off than white Americans.<br /><br />In&nbsp;<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-speech-text_us_57bf4575e4b02673444f2307">her speech</a> in August of 2016, when Hillary Clinton warned against the "Alt-Right" support for Trump, she quoted from the <em>Wall Street Journal </em>as describing the Alternative Right as a movement that “rejects mainstream conservatism, promotes nationalism and views immigration and multiculturalism as threats to white identity.”&nbsp; Some of the political scientists who study the political psychology of "white identity" present evidence that Trump's appeal depends on "white identity politics."&nbsp; White Americans who believe that they are threatened by non-white racial and ethnic groups were much more likely to vote for Trump than for Clinton.&nbsp; For these Trump supporters, the motivation is not <em>interest </em>but <em>identity</em>--their identity as white Americans, who have long been the majority in America, but who now fear becoming the minority as more non-white immigrants enter the country.<br /><br />Three of the speakers at the convention--John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck--have written a forthcoming book about this--<em>Identity Politics: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America.</em>&nbsp; They make two general points about how political scientists can explain Trump's appeal, which have been summarized in a couple of articles (<a href="https://nyti.ms/2vrdcBC">here</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/03/02/how-political-science-helps-explain-the-rise-of-trump-most-voters-arent-ideologues/?utm_term=.c4204978183b">here).</a>&nbsp; First, most voters are not ideologues: they don't organize their political beliefs through some coherent political theory such as liberalism, conservatism, or libertarianism.&nbsp; It should not surprise us, therefore, that Trump could appeal to many republican voters even though he has no consistent commitment to the conservative or libertarian ideas that are thought to characterize the Republican Party.<br /><br />Their second point is that instead of being motivated by any intellectual ideology, the Trump supporters are indeed motivated by white identity.&nbsp; This is not the same as white supremacy, because white supremacists are only a small minority of the Trump supporters.&nbsp; Rather, what moves most of the Trump supporters is a sense that white Americans are losing their dominant status in America--that they are being discriminated against by policies like affirmative action, that they are losing jobs to nonwhites, and that the immigration of nonwhites into America will soon make white Americans a minority.&nbsp; Through survey research, Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck have shown that while fewer than 5% of white Republicans who think that their racial identity is not important supported Trump, 81% of white Republicans who think their white identity is very important voted for Trump.&nbsp; Although most of these "white identifiers"&nbsp;are not white supremacists, the Alt-Right can appeal to their sense of white identity.<br /><br />In some previous posts (<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2016/08/darwinian-liberalism-versus-trumps-alt.html">here</a> and <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2016/05/a-natural-desire-for-ethnic-identity.html">here),</a> I have argued against the Alt-Right supporters of Trump who appeal to the defense of "ethnic genetic interests" as rooted in human evolution.&nbsp; I am persuaded that evolved human nature is inclined to tribal thinking, so that we naturally&nbsp;categorize people as&nbsp;<em>us </em>and <em>them</em>, and we naturally favor our group over others.&nbsp; And while the social conditions of life have often&nbsp;predisposed people to make this in-group/out-group division along racial and ethnic lines, there is no evidence that this predisposition is an innate adaptation of the human mind.&nbsp; On the contrary, there is lots of evidence that while we are innately inclined to look for cues of coalitional affiliation, the content of those cues depends on social learning; and people in multi-racial and multi-ethnic societies can&nbsp;learn to be cooperative without regard for racial or ethnic boundaries.<br /><br />Aristotle observed: "Dissimilarity of race is also conducive to factional conflict, until a cooperative spirit develops" (1303a25).&nbsp; I agree.&nbsp; Racial differences&nbsp;often&nbsp;divide a country.&nbsp; But the liberal culture of an open society can promote a multiracial cooperative spirit.<br /><br />Some of the pro-Trump political scientists on the Claremont panels&nbsp;scorned this idea of America as a multiracial open society, and they did so by appealing to their teacher--Leo Strauss.&nbsp;One of them was&nbsp;Michael Anton, the author of the famous "Flight 93" essay arguing that&nbsp;electing Trump was the only way to avoid the death of America through Clinton's election.&nbsp; Anton now sits on Trump's National Security Council.&nbsp;&nbsp;He cited Strauss's letters to Alexandre Kojeve&nbsp;as supporting the Trumpian claim that America must avoid the degrading effects of globalization by asserting its national identity as a closed society.&nbsp; (Last February, <em>The New York Times</em> published&nbsp;a good <a href="https://nyti.ms/2lo8FfX">article</a> on the Straussian supporters of Trump.)<br /><br />Similarly, Tom West suggested that protecting American identity might require closing the borders to all but white&nbsp;European immigrants.&nbsp;&nbsp;As a standard, he quoted from the nation's first naturalization law of 1790, which&nbsp;restricted naturalization to&nbsp;"any alien being a free white person."&nbsp; In his new book, West claims that "a policy welcoming non-European immigrants would have been rejected by all" during the American founding (267).&nbsp; At the convention, West appealed to white identity politics by arguing that white Americans were victims of discrimination that favored the interests of minority groups and nonwhite immigrants.<br /><br />The racial division between Trump voters and Clinton voters holds for both men and women.&nbsp; At the convention, Jane Junn of the University of Southern California pointed out that the "gender gap" between the Democrats and the Republicans is actually a "racial gap."&nbsp; Although Democratic presidential candidates usually win the majority of women voters, Republican presidential candidates usually win the majority of <em>white </em>women, which was true for Trump.&nbsp; And in the case of Trump, white women were voting against a white woman!<br /><br />Nonetheless, some of those who look to Trump as a defender of American identity seem to define that identity in non-racial terms.&nbsp; One of the political scientists at the convention explaining Trump's appeal was Katherine Cramer, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who&nbsp;wrote <em>The Politics of Resentment:&nbsp;Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker</em> (2016).<em>&nbsp;&nbsp;</em>In Wisconsin, she sees the supporters of Scott Walker and Trump as an us-versus-them resentment against the political elites, but rather than being based on a racial divide, the largely rural white citizens of northern Wisconsin feel resentful against the urban people in Madison and Milwaukee, who show no respect for rural Wisconsin.&nbsp; Cramer recorded conversations among 39 groups of people in 27 small communities in northern Wisconsin over five years.&nbsp; These people complained that Wisconsin's state government was controlled by people in the urban areas who favored their own interests, who used government programs to benefit lazy people, including state government employees who advanced their interests at the expense of&nbsp;the hard-working taxpayers.&nbsp; These rural citizens were the ones who supported Walker's attack on state employee benefits and his efforts to reduce state government generally.&nbsp; These were also the rural voters who gave Trump&nbsp;his victory.&nbsp; (This was true across the nation--Clinton lost the rural vote to Trump by huge margins.&nbsp; Similarly, the Brexit voting in Great Britain was much stronger in rural areas than in London.)<br /><br />Cramer argues that while these white Republican voters show some evidence of racism--they refer to the highway dividing northern and southern Wisconsin as the "Mason-Dixon line"--their xenophobic resentment is based mostly not on racial differences but on their "rural consciousness" as set against the urban life of Madison and Milwaukee, where the Democrats are the majority.&nbsp; Some of Cramer's critics have complained that she does not give a good explanation for the causes of this "rural consciousness," except to say that it has been passed down through families.&nbsp; Some of the critics have suggested that she should have considered the influence of conservative talk-radio in Wisconsin.<br /><br />So it seems that although&nbsp;the motivations for the Trump voters were complicated, the general pattern is clear: Trump prevailed through a demagogic rhetoric of populist resentment against arrogant exploitative elites.&nbsp; The question now is what to do about the consequences of electing to the presidency someone who is unfit to fill the office.&nbsp; <br /><br />Remarkably, I did not hear any political scientist defend Trump's fitness for the office.&nbsp; The only defense for the Trump presidency that I heard was&nbsp;the claim that some of the people appointed by Trump were well qualified to promote policies that would reduce the Administrative State, which is the goal of the Claremont folks.&nbsp; But even on this point, some of the Trump supporters (for example, Stephen Balch of Texas Tech University)&nbsp;admitted that Trump's bad character might ultimately prove more damaging to American&nbsp;conservatism than anything that Hillary Clinton might have done as President.<br /><br />So far, the&nbsp;harm that&nbsp;Trump can do has been mitigated by his incompetence.&nbsp; But even an incompetent narcissistic demagogue can be so dangerous that we might hope for his impeachment, or (more likely) his resignation to avoid impeachment.<br /><br />My earlier post on "Straussians for Trump," with links to other posts, can be found <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2016/06/straussians-for-trump-degradation-of.html">here.</a>Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-40697340541458395012017-08-26T12:32:00.000+01:002017-08-26T13:49:24.839+01:00West on the American Founding (7): Zuckert and the Evolutionary State of NatureWest and Zuckert agree that the fundamental idea for the natural rights philosophy of the American founders was the state of nature.&nbsp; West writes: "The state of nature is the basis of the founders' understanding of politics.&nbsp; If human beings are born free and equal in a natural state, subject only to the laws of nature, then government is a product of human making to secure the equal natural rights of the citizens" (409).&nbsp; Zuckert sees the Declaration of Independence structured as a syllogism, in which the second paragraph states the major premises arranged in a temporal sequence corresponding to the history of human political experience, which begins with the pre-political condition in the state of nature, where all men are free and equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights (18-19).&nbsp; If that is not true, the Declaration's syllogism fails.<br /><br />Many critics of social contract theory and of the Declaration of Independence have denied the historical reality of this state of nature.&nbsp; After all, all human beings have been born into societies, subjected to the authority of their parents and others in their society.&nbsp; Human infants living a solitary life would soon die.<br /><br />Although this criticism might apply to Rousseau's account of the state of nature as an utterly asocial condition of solitary individuals, it does not apply to Locke's account of the state of nature as human beings living in social bands of hunter-gatherers without formal government or laws but with customary norms of conduct that constitute a law of nature.&nbsp; For Locke, the historical reality of this state of nature is evident in the life of the American Indians, who lived the sort of hunting-gathering way of life that must have characterized our ancient human ancestors: "In the beginning, all the world was America."<br /><br />As I have indicated in some other <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-evolutionary-anthropology-of.html">posts,</a> Locke studied the reports of the American Indians living in foraging bands as evidence of how human beings originally lived in a state of nature prior to the turn to agriculture and the establishment of government, and most of what Locke inferred has been confirmed by modern research in evolutionary anthropology.&nbsp; <br /><br />Here Locke was following the lead of ancient authors like Lucretius and Dicaearchus, who saw that the first human beings must have lived as hunter-gatherers, which Dicaearchus called "the state of nature."&nbsp; Although the Declaration of Independence does not use the term "state of nature," the idea is implied in the claim that human beings are naturally equal in their liberty until "governments are instituted among men."<br /><br />Remarkably, however, Zuckert argues that "the Declaration does not present literal or empirical history, but moral history." "The Declaration is not speaking of some primordial prepolitical condition in which human beings wander the forests 'lonely as a cloud'" (23).&nbsp; The Declaration's history is actually "mythic history" (145). But then he seems to contradict this when he says that the Declaration is exploring "the primeval human condition, the condition prior to the establishment of government and prior to all humanly established laws and rights" (102).<br /><br />Moreover, Zuckert recognizes that Jefferson, like Locke, thought that the American Indians showed the historical reality of the state of nature (68-69).&nbsp; According to Jefferson, the Indians manifest "the circumstance of their having never submitted themselves to any laws, any coercive power, any shadow of government.&nbsp; Their only controls are their manners, and that moral sense of right and wrong, which, like the sense of tasting and feeling, in&nbsp;every man makes a part of his nature.&nbsp; An offense against these is punished by contempt, by exclusion from society, or, where the case is serious, as that of murder, by the individuals whom it concerns" (<em>Notes on the State of Virginia</em>, Query XI).&nbsp; <br /><br />Jefferson's insight here into the evolution of the moral sense in foraging bands has been confirmed by the evidence gathered and analyzed by evolutionary anthropologists like Christopher Boehm, who see the evolution of morality through indirect reciprocity, or what Locke called "the law of reputation," which has been the subject of a <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-evolution-of-indirect-reciprocity.html">post</a>.<br /><br />From the evolutionary anthropology of the 18th century Scottish philosophers and historians, Jefferson adopted the "four stages theory" of human evolutionary progress--hunting, pastoral, agricultural, and commercial (see Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, Jan. 30, 1787; Letter to William Ludlow, Sept. 6, 1824; and Ronald Meek, <em>Social Science and the Ignoble Savage</em>, 1976).<br /><br />West quotes a remark by John Adams that West takes as expressing a "view shared by all the founders" (103):<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"Men, in their primitive conditions, however savage, were undoubtedly gregarious; and they continue to be social, not only in every stage of civilization, but in every possible situation in which they can be placed.&nbsp; As nature intended them for society, she has furnished them with passions, appetites, and propensities, as well as a variety of faculties, calculated both for their individual enjoyment, and to render them useful to each other in their social connections.&nbsp; There is none among them more essential or remarkable, then the <em>passion for distinction</em>. A desire to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved, and admired by his fellows, is one of the earliest, as well as keenest dispositions discovered in the heart of man" (<em>Discourses on Davila</em>, II).</blockquote>The natural sociality of human beings, even in&nbsp;the primitive state of nature without government, and the evolution of a natural moral law from the natural social concern for praise and blame have been corroborated by modern research in evolutionary anthropology.<br /><br />West argues that the American founders did not see the state of nature as something found only in the distant primeval past, because they thought it was an ever present reality.&nbsp; So, for example, when the Americans declared their independence from Great Britain, they momentarily entered the state of nature until they instituted a new government over them.&nbsp; Moreover, in affirming the natural right to revolution, the Americans understood that people could enter the state of nature at any time in the future when they might judge that their government was not securing their natural rights, and that they must invoke their natural right to alter or abolish their government, and institute new government that might seem to them most likely to effect their safety and happiness by securing their natural rights.<br /><br />I agree with this, but I also believe that Locke was&nbsp;correct in thinking that the only way to explain how these natural rights are really natural for human beings is to see how they express the primordial human nature shaped in the original state of nature of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-19524304244587881552017-08-25T18:14:00.000+01:002017-08-25T18:27:24.254+01:00West on the American Founding (6): Zuckert and the Amalgam ThesisThomas West recognizes that his account of the American founding as based on the theory of natural rights resembles Michael Zuckert's interpretation of the founding as establishing a "natural rights republic" (Zuckert 1996).&nbsp; And yet West insists that he rejects Zuckert's "amalgam thesis"--the idea that while the theory of natural rights is the primary element in the political thought of the founding, the tradition of natural rights thinking is combined&nbsp;with other traditions--such as civic&nbsp;republicanism, Protestant Christianity, British constitutionalism, and perhaps others--that are in tension with the tradition of natural rights.&nbsp; <br /><br />In recent decades, West observes, this idea of the political thought of the founding as mixture of different and sometimes conflicting intellectual traditions has become the predominant scholarly consensus, which Zuckert shares with scholars like William Galston, Thomas Pangle, and Paul Rahe.&nbsp; But West complains that this makes the founders appear to be confused or incoherent in their thinking.&nbsp; Against this, he proposes to explain the natural rights theory of the founders as a theoretically coherent understanding of politics without any tension or contradictions.<br /><br />Nonetheless, a careful reading and comparison of West's and Zuckert's books will show, I think, that West's <em>explicit </em>rejection of Zuckert's "amalgam thesis" is contradicted by West's <em>implicit </em>acceptance of Zuckert's argument.&nbsp; Although this might seem to be a trivial scholarly quibble, it points to some of the fundamental questions about the American political regime and about the theory of natural rights as applied to that regime.<br /><br />Zuckert explains:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">". . . what made America was the way these four elements--Old Whig constitutionalism, political religion, republicanism, and the natural rights philosophy--come together.&nbsp; The amalgamation that occurred in America was unique in the world, and led America to a unique path of political development and to a particularly tense existence as these four different and, in some dimensions, incompatible elements fell in and out of harmony with each other.&nbsp; In that amalgam, however, the four elements did not all enjoy an equal status; the natural rights philosophy remains America's deepest and so far most abiding commitment, and the others could enter the amalgam only so far as they were compatible, or could be made so, with natural rights.&nbsp; The truly remarkable thing is the demonstrated capacity of the natural rights philosophy to assimilate the other three and hold them all together in a coherent if not always easily subsisting whole" (Zuckert 1996, 95).</blockquote>West quotes some of this language--"tense existence . . . incompatible elements"--as suggesting that the political thought of the founders was an incoherent mixture of contradictory elements; and against that idea, West claims that he&nbsp;can show that the natural rights philosophy of the founders was fully coherent and free from any tense contradictions (West 2017, 46).<br /><br />But notice that Zuckert sees this American amalgam&nbsp;of different&nbsp;elements&nbsp;as rendered coherent by the preeminence of natural rights as the ruling element, so that the other elements can enter the amalgam only in so far as they can be made compatible with natural rights.&nbsp; Thus, Zuckert can describe this as "an amalgamation in which the natural rights commitment has remained senior partner but has brought into its political orbit English Whig historical commitments, Protestant political theology, and premodern political republicanism" (240-41).<br /><br />West seems to agree with this, because he says that the success of the American Revolution required a combination of natural rights thinking with the "distinctive ethnic character, religion, and legal heritage" of America, and to that extent,&nbsp;he concedes, "the amalgam thesis is correct: natural rights are not enough."&nbsp; But just as Zuckert speaks of natural rights as the "senior partner" in the amalgam, West speaks of natural rights as taking the "leading role" (West 2017, 52).&nbsp; <br /><br />So here West and Zuckert agree on the amalgam thesis: that the political thought of the founding was a mixture of historical, religious, and political traditions, but that the natural rights philosophy was the preeminent element in that mixture, so that all the other elements had to be somehow assimilated into that natural rights thinking.<br /><br />West also recognizes, at least implicitly, some of the same "tension" that Zuckert sees between natural rights thinking and some of the other elements of the American amalgam.&nbsp; For example, Zuckert shows how the Lockeanization of New England Puritan thought required the rejection of the Puritan theocracy that prevailed in the colonial period.&nbsp; Similarly, West shows how the theory of natural rights required moving away from the governmental enforcement of Mosaic theocracy towards a separation of church and state, so that "government is no longer in the business of defining the one true religion," and "individuals are free to live their lives independently of religious faith" (407).&nbsp; The tension between Protestant Christian theocracy and Lockean religious toleration was softened if not overcome by deciding that Roger Williams was right that Protestant Christianity required a "wall of separation" between "spiritual things" and "civil things."<br /><br /><br />REFERENCES<br /><br />West, Thomas G. 2017. <em>The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom</em>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.<br /><br />Zuckert, Michael. 1996. <em>The Natural Rights Republic: Studies in the Foundation of the American Political Tradition</em>. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-31080095570489982512017-08-17T20:27:00.001+01:002017-08-18T00:40:18.504+01:00"The Lord of the Rings" Films Refute Tolkien's Anti-Modernity"He disliked the modern world."&nbsp; So said Christopher Tolkien about his father.&nbsp; <br /><br />Tolkien's disgust with the modern world began in his childhood.&nbsp; From the age of 4 to 8 (1896 to 1900), Tolkien lived with his widowed mother in the hamlet of Sarehole, a mile south of Birmingham, England.&nbsp; This rural English village had a rustic life unlike the industrialized life of Birmingham.&nbsp; Later in life, Tolkien said that he remembered those four years as his time living in the Shire, when he became a young Hobbit.<br /><br />His mother converted to Catholicism, despite the fierce opposition of her family, who ostracized her.&nbsp; He then became a child convert at 8, and for his whole life he was a devout traditionalist Catholic, with a love for the Middle Ages and a scorn for the modern world shaped by the Protestant Reformation, which had turned away from the only True Church.<br /><br />His mother was forced to move to central Birmingham in a small house overlooking a busy, noisy&nbsp;street with ugly buildings and a view in the distance of smoking factory chimneys.&nbsp; He later said that his life in Birmingham, dominated by modern mechanization and industrialism, was "dreadful."&nbsp; The contrast between Sarehole and Birmingham is echoed in the contrast between the Shire and Mordor in <em>The Lord of the Rings.</em><br /><em></em><br /><em>The Lord of the Rings </em>and most of Tolkien's other writing can be read as a criticism of the technological, materialistic, and capitalistic civilization of the modern world, and as expressing a longing for the rustic simplicity and communal life of premodern English villages.&nbsp; John Clute has described <em>The Lord of the Rings </em>as "a comprehensive counter-myth to the story of the twentieth century," because "what had happened to life in the twentieth century was profoundly inhuman."&nbsp; Tolkien's counter-myth, Clute claimed, was "a description of a universe that feels right--another reality that the soul requires in this waste-land century."<br /><br />But is this really true--that life in the twentieth century was profoundly inhuman?&nbsp; And that a more truly human life would have required a return to the village life of medieval England?<br /><br />It is easy to understand how the first half of the twentieth century--particularly, the brutality and violence of the two world wars--created a scorn for modernity in people like Tolkien.&nbsp; But the triumph of modern liberalism in the second half of the century--with growing freedom and prosperity around the world--makes it easier to see moral progress in modern life.&nbsp; (I have written a series of posts on human progress in November and December of 2016.)<br /><br />After all, doesn't Tolkien's own life show the moral and intellectual benefits of living in modern liberal societies?&nbsp; <br /><br />Tolkien became a professor at Oxford University who was a member of a community of Christian&nbsp;scholars and writers--the Inklings--that included C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams.&nbsp; They met at least twice a week&nbsp;as philosophic friends&nbsp;for conversations about the philosophic, theological, and literary topics that concerned them.&nbsp; <br /><br />Every time that I am in Oxford, I go to the Eagle and the Child pub where the Inklings met for beer and conversation every Thursday.&nbsp; They called it "The Bird and the Baby."<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Bw-bEg4NINU/WZYpQ7l6XWI/AAAAAAAABDU/Aa6QQ-oC_NMRUhGBQ_95ABeFhyPbMuvVwCLcBGAs/s1600/Eagle_and_Child.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Bw-bEg4NINU/WZYpQ7l6XWI/AAAAAAAABDU/Aa6QQ-oC_NMRUhGBQ_95ABeFhyPbMuvVwCLcBGAs/s320/Eagle_and_Child.jpg" width="239" /></a></div><br /><br />Tolkien helped to convert Lewis to Christianity, but Tolkien was deeply disappointed that Lewis joined the Anglican Church and refused to convert to Catholicism.&nbsp;&nbsp;Lewis had grown up&nbsp;in the world of Ulster Protestants in Northern Ireland, and Tolkien thought that Lewis&nbsp;never abandoned the anti-Catholic prejudices of the Ulster Protestants.&nbsp; But since they lived in early twentieth century England, when the&nbsp;modern liberal culture of religious toleration and freedom was beginning to flourish, Tolkien and Lewis could be good friends.&nbsp; Tolkien said that without Lewis's help and encouragement, he might never have finished writing <em>The Lord of the Rings.&nbsp;&nbsp; </em>This would not have been possible in a premodern village dominated by the authority of the Catholic Church.<br /><br />And if the twentieth century was such an inhuman wasteland, how does one explain the popularity of Tolkien's books and the movies based on the books?&nbsp; His books have had tens of millions of readers, and the movies have had even larger audiences.<br /><br /><em>The Lord of the Rings </em>movies have become one of the highest-grossing film series in the history of cinema--almost $6 billion.&nbsp; The average per film is exceeded only by the <em>Harry Potter </em>movies.&nbsp; So it seems that modern capitalist profit-seeking can support high literary and cinematic art.&nbsp; Moreover, cinema is an artistic invention of the twentieth century arising from modern technology.<br /><br />As I suggested in my previous post, the artistry of <em>The Lord of the Rings </em>movies is particularly evident in the music for the movies composed, orchestrated, conducted, and produced by Howard Shore.&nbsp; One can see this by reading the Wikipedia <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_The_Lord_of_the_Rings_film_series">article</a> on Shore's music for the films, which is based mostly on the magnificent book by Doug Adams, <em>The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films </em>(2010).<br /><br />I believe that a good case can be made that the movies actually improve on Tolkien's books, mostly because of the music, which comes from Shore's careful study of the books and the scripts and his Wagnerian artistry in turning the books into an opera.<br /><br />One of many examples of this musical deepening of Tolkien's writing is the song that is sung at the end of <em>The Return of the King</em> during the closing credits--"Into the West," which was composed by Annie Lennox and Shore and sung by Lennox.&nbsp; It won the Academy Award for best song in 2003.<br /><br />Here are the lyrics:<br /><br /><div class="pvc_title_with_frows"><div class="paratitle"><h2 class="b_topTitle">Into the West</h2></div></div><div class="b_paractl">Lay down<br />Your sweet and weary head<br />The night is falling<br />You have come to journey's end<br />Sleep now<br />And dream of the ones who came before<br />They are calling<br />From across the distant shore</div><div class="b_paractl">Why do you weep?<br />What are these tears upon your face?<br />Soon you will see<br />All of your fears will pass away<br />Safe in my arms<br />You're only sleeping</div><div class="b_paractl">What can you see<br />On the horizon?<br />Why do the white gulls call?<br />Across the sea<br />A pale moon rises<br />The ships have come to carry you home</div><div class="b_paractl">And all will turn<br />To silver glass<br />A light on the water<br />All Souls pass</div><div class="b_paractl">Hope fades<br />Into the world of night<br />Through shadows falling<br />Out of memory and time<br />Don't say<br />We have come now to the end<br />White shores are calling<br />You and I will meet again<br />And you'll be here in my arms<br />Just sleeping</div><div class="b_paractl">And all will turn<br />To silver glass<br />A light on the water<br />Grey ships pass<br />Into the West</div><br />The imagery and some of the phrases here are taken from the last chapter ("The Grey Havens") of Tolkien's <em>Return of the King.&nbsp; </em>People have debated whether <em>The Lord of the Rings</em> conveys Catholic Christian themes, as Tolkien said it did.&nbsp; Part of that debate is whether there is any suggestion in the book of immortality in an afterlife.&nbsp; The last chapter is ambiguous about this.&nbsp; Frodo is sailing away on a white ship, leaving Sam, Merry, and Pippin behind in the Shire.&nbsp; One can see some intimation of immortality, but it's unclear, and some readers can infer that the only human life is the mortal life of the people in the Shire.&nbsp; The song has this same ambiguity, and it conveys it in a way that is deeply moving.&nbsp; (I have written a series of posts on immortality, in October and November of 2013, and on Heaven and Hell, in April and May of 2010.)<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/shdiTRxTJb4/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/shdiTRxTJb4?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div><br /><br />Sunday night, this will conclude the Ravinia Festival's showing of the three movies with live music.&nbsp; Many of the people in the pavilion and on the lawn will be moved to tears.<br /><br />The modern world of the twentieth century, and now the twenty-first century, can't be as&nbsp;morally, intellectually, and spiritually impoverished&nbsp;as Tolkien thought it was if we can be moved in such a way by Tolkien's myth of Middle-earth.<br /><br />Of course, for Augustinian Christians like Tolkien, no matter how good life on Earth might become, living in the "City of Man" must always be unsatisfying, as the soul longs for that fullness of joy--for that ultimate Happy Ending--that can only be found in the "City of God" in Heaven.Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-63104083444339047212017-08-10T19:34:00.000+01:002017-11-12T11:33:15.197+00:00The Storytelling Instinct in Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings"--Christian? Pagan? Wagnerian?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lfF-OJc_abI/WYyYZqSDkOI/AAAAAAAABDA/vbjAtielQ4AkbfP3MERo_NGABiFOWOqPQCLcBGAs/s1600/LOR-lord-of-the-rings-33322363-1024-768.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1024" height="240" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lfF-OJc_abI/WYyYZqSDkOI/AAAAAAAABDA/vbjAtielQ4AkbfP3MERo_NGABiFOWOqPQCLcBGAs/s320/LOR-lord-of-the-rings-33322363-1024-768.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br />Next week (August 18-20), the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, Illinois, will have three nights devoted to Peter Jackson's film trilogy of J. R. R. Tolkien's <em>Lord of the Rings</em>.&nbsp; The movies will be projected on large screens, and the Academy Award winning music by Howard Shore will be played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with a chorus of singers.&nbsp; My family and I&nbsp;have pavilion seats&nbsp;for all three nights.&nbsp; A few years ago, we were at Ravinia for the third movie--<em>The Return of the King.</em><br /><em></em><br />This will give me a good opportunity to think about the powerful appeal of Tolkien's story, and what this might reveal about storytelling as an evolved instinct of human nature.<br /><br />In the run up to the year 2000, several major polls asking people "What was the greatest book of the twentieth century?" found that first place went to <em>The Lord of the Rings</em>.&nbsp; This irritated many literary critics who dismissed Tolkien's fantasy story of Middle Earth as a bad fairytale for children that has become a low form of escapist fantasy for some adults.&nbsp; And yet many people have found this to be one of the most powerful works of fiction they have ever read.&nbsp; Jackson's film versions of the book--beginning with the <em>Fellowship of the Ring </em>in 2001--have become some of the most popular films of all time.<br /><br />So what is it about Tolkien's story that makes it so attractive and so moving for so many people?&nbsp; Does it show us, as Jonathan Gottschall has argued in <em>The Storytelling Animal</em>, that stories make us human, that storytelling is unique to human beings as part of their evolved nature?&nbsp; If so, is there something about Tolkien's story that satisfies that storytelling instinct better than most other stories?&nbsp; Or are the critics correct in dismissing this as a childish fantasy story?<br /><br />Many Christians have seen <em>The Lord of the Rings </em>as a profoundly Christian book, or more particularly as a profoundly <em>Catholic </em>Christian book.&nbsp; Tolkien was a devout English Catholic.&nbsp; And in 1955, one year after the publication of the book,&nbsp;he wrote to the English Jesuit Robert Murray: "<em>The Lord of the Rings </em>is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.&nbsp; That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like 'religion,' to cults or practices, in the imaginary world.&nbsp; The religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism."<br /><br />But notice the strange manner in which he speaks here.&nbsp; "Of course" it is "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work," and that is "why" the book has almost no references to religion!&nbsp; In fact, when the book was first published, many readers were surprised that there were no overt indications of any religious practices or beliefs in Tolkien's fictional world.&nbsp; Some readers have found Tolkien's "of course" to be an implausible effort by Tolkien to turn this into a&nbsp;Catholic Christian&nbsp;book, even though it is completely silent about religion.<br /><br />Some Christian readers have responded by defending Tolkien's claim that "the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism," by pointing to what Tolkien said in his essay "On Fairy Stories," which can be found <a href="http://www.rivendellcommunity.org/Formation/Tolkien_On_Fairy_Stories.pdf">online.</a>&nbsp; <br /><br />Tolkien sees fairy stories as the highest expression of the innate human capacity for fantasy--the uniquely human capacity for using language to create a "secondary world" of narrative fiction beyond the "primary world" of our ordinary experience.&nbsp; In creative fantasy, Tolkien claims, we act as "sub-creators."&nbsp; We are makers of art because we were made in the image and likeness of a Maker.&nbsp; Our Creator, who created everything from nothing, created us to be sub-creators.&nbsp;&nbsp; As storytellers, we manifest a storytelling instinct that belongs to us as part of God's Cosmic Story.<br /><br />Darwinian scientists like Gottschall can explain this human storytelling instinct as the product of a purely natural process of human evolution:&nbsp; we evolved to tell stories that help us navigate the complex social problems that we face as human beings, just as flight simulators help pilots to anticipate the problems they will face as pilots, and this social intelligence that we gain from stories that simulate social life enhances our chances for survival and reproduction in complex human societies.&nbsp; <br /><br />Some people will see this Darwinian story about the origin and function of storytelling as an alternative to Tolkien's Christian story about storytelling as part of our being created in God's image.&nbsp; The theistic evolutionist, however,&nbsp;will see the Darwinian story and the Christian story as compatible:&nbsp; the Creator could have used the evolutionary process to create the human storytelling instinct.<br /><br />According to Tolkien, in "On Fairy Stories," the highest function of fairy-stories is the "Consolation of the Happy Ending"--the joy of deliverance from evil and suffering, a deliverance&nbsp;that comes from the sudden turn to the "good catastrophe," a sudden and miraculous grace that denies the pervasive evidence for universal final defeat.<br /><br />Tolkien suggests that we might explain this joy that comes from a true fairy-story as "a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth," as "a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world."&nbsp; The joy of the consolation of the happy ending that comes from a fairy-story might echo the joy that comes from the Christian Story.&nbsp; <br /><br />After all, Tolkien claims, "the Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories," because the Gospels give us the most complete "good catastrophe"--the birth, death by crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ and the prophecy of the Second Coming of Christ, so that human beings can be redeemed and resurrected to eternal life at the end of history, which gives human beings the deepest joy of knowing that the history of everything has a happy ending.&nbsp; (Oddly, Tolkien says nothing about the eternal punishment of those in Hell.&nbsp; Where's the happy ending for them?)<br /><br />Tolkien told C. S. Lewis that Christianity was a myth, but a <em>true </em>myth.&nbsp; What are the signs of a true myth as opposed to a false myth?<br /><br />Tolkien's Christian readers might say&nbsp;that&nbsp;even though <em>The Lord of the Rings</em> says&nbsp;nothing overtly&nbsp;about religion or Christianity, it can still be a Christian story&nbsp;in so far as it shows "a gleam or&nbsp;echo of evangelium in the real world."<em>&nbsp;</em><br /><em></em><br />But that "gleam or echo" of the Christian Story seems very dim to those many readers of <em>The Lord of the Rings </em>who see that Tolkien's story draws much more from the pagan traditions of Nordic Europe and the folklore of fairy-tales than it does from Christian traditions of thought.&nbsp; Tolkien's world of wizards, elves, dragons, magic, witchcraft, and reincarnation, a world of dark fatalism and death with no prospect of final redemption and immortality, seems very far from a Christian world.&nbsp; Indeed, many, maybe most, of those readers who think this book is the "greatest book of the twentieth century" are not Christians, and they see no Christian message in the book.&nbsp; Even many Christian parents don't see this as a good book for teaching Christian lessons to their children.<br /><br />Moreover, the anti-Christian paganism of this book becomes even more evident as soon as one notices the influence of Richard Wagner's Ring cycle of four operas--<em>The Ring of the Nibelung</em>.&nbsp; Both Tolkien and Wagner drew deeply from Nordic mythology in their storytelling.&nbsp; <br /><br />The Christian scholars of Tolkien have dismissed this idea by quoting his response to the Swedish translator of <em>The Lord of the Rings </em>who suggested parallels between Tolkien's book and Wagner's Ring cycle: "Both rings are round, and there the resemblance ceases."&nbsp; The Christian scholars can also point to the obvious differences between the men: Wagner was an atheist socialist anarchist, and Tolkien was a Catholic traditionalist monarchist!<br /><br />But if one lays Tolkein's book next to Wagner's libretto for the Ring cycle, the similarities are striking, as indicated in some articles by&nbsp;<a href="http://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/04/wagner_tolkien_1.html">Alex Ross</a>, <a href="http://www.the-wagnerian.com/2012/10/two-rings-to-rule-them-all-comparative.html">James McGregor</a>, and <a href="http://www.the-wagnerian.com/2012/11/greed-and-nature-of-evil-tolkien-versus.html">Stefan Arvidsson</a>.&nbsp; &nbsp; <br /><br />"The lord of the ring is the slave of the ring."&nbsp; Since that line states one of the the fundamental themes&nbsp;of <em>The Lord of the Rings</em>, one might assume that it's a line from the book.&nbsp;&nbsp;Actually, it's a line from Alberich's curse on the ring in scene four of&nbsp;Wagner's <em>Rhinegold&nbsp;.&nbsp; </em>Arvidsson observes: "The fundamental idea of a ring endowed with power, a ring that confers power and wealth upon its bearer, while it also entices those who come in contact with it to evil deeds and breaks them down, is not found in the medieval sources. Rather, Tolkien must have borrowed it straight from Wagner."&nbsp; Moreover, as Arvidsson indicates, the ten steps in Wagner's narrative history of the ring correspond in some manner to Tolkien's narration of the ring.<br /><br />We know that Tolkien's friend C. S. Lewis was an avid student of Wagner's operas, that Lewis took Tolkien to a London performance of <em>The Valkyrie</em>, and that at one point the two of them set out to write a translation of that opera, the second in the cycle of four Ring operas.<br /><br />We also know, however, that Tolkien detested what he saw as Adolf Hitler's vicious distortion of Nordic mythology, and that Hitler's appropriation of Nordic mythology as providing a mythic frame for his German racist nationalism was deeply influenced by his experience of Wagner's operas.&nbsp; So, one possibility, as Arvidsson suggests, is that Tolkien wrote <em>The Lord of the Rings </em>to <em>correct </em>the Wagnerian interpretation of Nordic mythology that shaped the mythic nationalism of Hitler and others.<br /><br />In 1941, while he was writing <em>The Lord of the Rings</em>, Tolkien wrote in a letter: "Anyway, I have in this War a burning private grudge--which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will).&nbsp; Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light."<br /><br /><em>The Lord of the Rings </em>could be seen as Tolkien's effort to present "that noble northern spirit . . . in its true light" against the evil distortions of Hitler and Wagner.<br /><br />I have written about the Hitler-Wagner connection in some previous posts (<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2013/02/lyric-operas-die-meistersinger-wagner.html">here</a> and <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2013/11/nietzsche-hitler-and-wagners-parsifal.html">here).</a>&nbsp; I will think more about this in November, when I will see the new production of Wagner's <em>Valkyrie </em>by the Lyric Opera of Chicago, which is part of Lyric's new production of the entire Ring cycle.<br /><br />I also want to think about&nbsp;how Wagner's operatic storytelling, which combines music, singing, and theatrical drama, compares with Tolkien's storytelling through language alone.&nbsp; In "On Fairy Stories," Tolkien argues that storytelling is done best through words alone.<br /><br />Jackson's movie trilogy--and also his movie version of <em>The Hobbit</em>--turns Tolkien's purely literary work into something like an opera.&nbsp; This raises the question of whether Jackson's movies are better or worse than Tolkien's books.&nbsp; Some people--Alex Ross, for example--argue that the movies are better than the books, because Shore's music employs Wagnerian musical artistry that deepens the emotional impact of the storytelling of Tolkien's words.<br /><br />Shore deliberately composed his music to employ Wagner's operatic techniques in the Ring cycle:&nbsp;Shore's musical score includes over 100 leitmotifs (short musical phrases associated with particular people, places, or ideas) and singing by choir and soloists.&nbsp; It's the most elaborate musical score in the history of cinema.&nbsp;&nbsp;That's why the three performances at Ravinia, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, choir, and soloists,&nbsp;will be&nbsp;such a treat.<br /><br />Shore evokes Wagner at the very end of the trilogy by echoing Wagner's final music closing the Ring.&nbsp; Doug Adams (in <em>The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films</em>) describes it this way: "After a suite of musical highlights from <em>The Return of the King</em>, the orchestra introduces a new line, a series of lilting <em>arpeggios </em>climbing high over lapping chords.&nbsp; This is Shore's nod to Richard Wagner's <em>Gotterdammerung</em>, the final opera in his <em>Ring des Nibelungen</em>."<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/FkRo26uvBCA/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FkRo26uvBCA?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5p_nelHX34o/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5p_nelHX34o?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div>Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-14028683690405362342017-08-06T15:47:00.000+01:002017-08-06T15:47:55.575+01:00West on the American Founding (5): The Philosophic Life in AmericaAs West indicates, his Straussian colleagues will object to his claim that the American founders wanted government to promote the virtues by arguing that they did not promote the highest virtues, which are the intellectual virtues of the philosophic life (298-306).<br /><br />In "Ethics and Politics: The American Way," Diamond anticipates this Straussian objection.&nbsp; He answers with one sentence: "Finally, and with a brevity disproportionate&nbsp; to importance, one should also note gratefully that the American political order, with its heterogeneous and fluctuating majorities and with its principle of liberty, supplies a not inhospitable home to the love of learning" (363).&nbsp; He offers no elaboration or evidence to support this.<br /><br />West concedes that when the founders spoke about public education, they saw it as directed towards "useful" knowledge (such as science that could improve agriculture and manufacturing) and the formation of good citizens and statesmen; and they said nothing about the possibility of public education that would lead those of superior intellect to live a philosophic life.&nbsp; They certainly did not recommend anything like what Plato's Socrates proposed in <em>The Republic </em>for the public education of philosophers.<br /><br />And yet some of the founders did occasionally express respect for the life of the mind.&nbsp; In particular, West quotes remarks by George Washington, John Adams, James Wilson, and Benjamin Franklin that suggest that a life of intellectual inquiry might be one of the highest human goods.&nbsp; <br /><br />At the Constitutional Convention in 1987, it is reported in Madison's notes that Wilson remarked: "he could not agree that property was the sole or the primary object of government and society.&nbsp; The cultivation and improvement of the human mind was the most noble object" (July 13).&nbsp; This statement is somewhat vague, however.&nbsp; And West quotes Thomas Pangle's observation that&nbsp;Wilson's statement "betrays no awareness of any possible tension or gulf between the philosophic and the political life, and bespeaks no classical notion of the superiority of the former to the latter."&nbsp; Here Pangle expresses the distinctively Straussian claim about "the ultimate superiority of the contemplative life to that of the citizen or statesman, and the gulf between the two ways of life" (West, 306).&nbsp; And in pointing to the "tension or gulf between the philosophic and the political life," Pangle brings up the famous Straussian teaching about the irresolvable conflict between philosophy and politics, which makes esoteric writing necessary to protect philosophers from persecution and to protect politics from subversion by philosophy.<br /><br />This Straussian view of the philosophic life suggests three questions about the American founders.&nbsp; Did they see the natural goodness of philosophizing?&nbsp; Did they see that a life of philosophizing is&nbsp;naturally&nbsp;superior to&nbsp;any other life?&nbsp; Did they see that the conflict between philosophy and politics makes the liberal freedom of speech and thought for philosophers impossible or dangerous?&nbsp; <br /><br />I would answer yes to the first question, but no to the second and third questions.&nbsp; West clearly answers yes to the first question, and he&nbsp;also answers yes, although not so clearly, to the second and third questions.<br /><br />Of all the founders, Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson show most clearly a love of philosophical thought and conversation.&nbsp; West thinks that Kevin Slack, in an article in <em>American Political Thought</em> (Spring 2013), has made a good case for seeing Franklin as a philosopher.&nbsp; In&nbsp;some previous posts (<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2016/09/steven-smiths-straussian-scorn-for.html">here</a>&nbsp;and <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2016/09/smith-and-strauss-on-bourgeois.html">here),</a> I have agreed with Steven Smith, in his book <em>Modernity and Its Discontents,</em> that Franklin's promotion of philosophic clubs for conversation and debate and his scientific research in natural philosophy show that he was an "American Socrates" living "a life uniquely devoted to the pleasures of the mind."&nbsp; But then I criticize Smith for ignoring this in the rest of his book, where he embraces the Straussian scorn for the bourgeois life as flat and boring in failing to aspire to the higher human excellences, and thus ignoring how the bourgeois virtues of Franklin include the highest moral and intellectual virtues.&nbsp; I have indicated in a previous post (<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2016/08/bourgeois-virtues.html">here)</a> how Deirdre McCloskey tries to present Franklin's bourgeois virtues as encompassing all of the traditional moral and intellectual virtues.<br /><br />As West indicates, Adams as a young man identified Xenophon as his favorite author.&nbsp; Adams also reported that he had read all of Plato's dialogues, reading them in English, Latin,&nbsp;and French translations and then checking the Greek for important passages.&nbsp; He was a careful and thoughtful reader of many other philosophers.&nbsp; <br /><br />West quotes from a letter that Adams wrote to his wife in 1780: "It is not indeed the fine arts which our country requires.&nbsp; The useful, the mechanic arts, are those which we have occasion for in a young country. . . . I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.&nbsp; My sons ought to study mathematics, and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."&nbsp; <br /><br />West observes: "Adams emphasizes the cultivation of useful studies for the sake of ultimately transcending the whole dimension of the practical for the sake of contemplating that which is beautiful but useless" (305).<br /><br />Well, perhaps, but isn't there also a tone of irony as Adams moves down his list--from politics to philosophy to tapestry and porcelain?<br /><br />One of the clearest manifestations of intellectual intensity in the discussion of the deepest philosophic questions is in the letters between Adams and Jefferson, particularly in the last 14 years of their lives before they both died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.&nbsp; <br /><br />The correspondence of Adams and Jefferson is conveniently available at the <a href="https://www.founders.archives.gov/">Founders Online</a> website of the National Archives.&nbsp; Lester Cappon edited the complete correspondence between Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, published by the University of North Carolina Press, 1987.<br /><br />There had been no correspondence between Adams and Jefferson between 1801 and 1812, although there was some correspondence between Abigail Adams and Jefferson in 1804.&nbsp; Of course, Adams and Jefferson had become vehement political adversaries in the conflict between the Federalists and the Republicans.&nbsp; Dr. Benjamin Rush, their mutual friend, began in 1809 trying to bring a reconciliation between these former friends.&nbsp; In 1811, Adams told someone "I always loved Jefferson, and still love him."&nbsp; Finally, in January of 1812, their correspondence resumed.&nbsp; Adams remarked: "You and I ought not to die, before we have explained ourselves to each other" (July 15, 1813).<br /><br />Jefferson began by recalling all the trials during the Revolution and Founding period, when "we were fellow laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right of self-government."&nbsp; He wrote: "politics, of which I have taken final leave I think little of them, &amp; say less.&nbsp; I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus &amp; Thucydides, for Newton &amp; Euclid; and I find myself much happier" (January 21, 1812).&nbsp; Adams responded: "you and I are weary of Politicks" (February 10, 1812).<br /><br />And while they do discuss politics a great deal in their letters, most of their discussion is about the books they are reading and the philosophical and theological questions raised by those books.&nbsp; For example, they agree in rejecting Platonic metaphysics and theology as well as the corruption of Christianity by Platonic ideas.&nbsp; Jefferson hopes "to prepare this euthanasia for Platonic Christianity, and its restoration to the primitive simplicity of its founder" (October 13, 1813).&nbsp; After a serious reading of Plato's <em>Republic, </em>Jefferson asserts that "the doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them" (April 5, 1814).&nbsp; Adams agrees that Platonic Christianity, which is Catholic Christianity, has prevailed for 1500 years.&nbsp; It must finally die, but it might take centuries for this to happen (July 16, 1814).<br /><br />Jefferson and Adams agree that "the human understanding is a revelation from its maker" (October 13, 1813), and therefore human beings should rely on their own natural&nbsp;reasoning about religion rather than submitting to the authority of those priests and kings who claim to have received some miraculous revelation from God.&nbsp; Adams declares: "The question before the human race is, Whether the God of nature shall govern the World by his own laws, or Whether Priests and Kings shall rule it by fictitious Miracles? Or, in other Words, whether Authority is originally in the People?&nbsp; or whether it has descended for 1800 years in a succession of Popes and Bishops" (June 20, 1815).<br /><br />For Jefferson an originally materialist Christianity has been corrupted by the influence of Platonic dualist&nbsp;metaphysics--separating Matter and Spirit--that created a spiritualist Christianity.&nbsp; Jefferson thought that primitive Christianity was purely materialist in believing that both man and God were purely corporeal, and that even immortality required a resurrection of bodies, so that there was no immortality of the soul separated from body (August 15, 1820).&nbsp; (John Colman has written a good article on this that has been published in <em>American Political Thought, </em>summer 2017.)<br /><br />Adams thought there was no utility in reviving the controversy between the Spiritualists, who thought that mind shows the action of spirit upon matter, and the Materialists, who thought that matter alone exists, because the relation between Spirit and Matter is a riddle that is forever beyond human understanding (May 26, 1817).&nbsp; Jefferson, however, thought that it was reasonable to think that only Matter exists, and that thought arises as an activity or conformation of matter.&nbsp; He admitted that this puzzle was ultimately incomprehensible to the human mind.&nbsp; But "I confess I should, with&nbsp;Mr. Locke, prefer swallowing one incomprehensibility rather than two.&nbsp; It requires one effort only to admit the single incomprehensibility of matter endowed with thought: and two to believe, 1st. that of an existence called Spirit, of which we have neither evidence nor idea, and then 2ndly. how that spirit which has neither extension nor solidity, can put material organs into motion" (March 14, 1820).<br /><br />Jefferson thought he had found scientific proof for materialism in 1825, when he read a paper by Jean Pierre Flourens--<em>Recherches experimentales sur les proprieties et les fonctions du systeme nerveux dans les animaux vertebres </em>(Experimental Researches on the Properties and the Functions of the Nervous System in Vertebrate Animals).&nbsp; Flourens was one of the founders of experimental brain science.&nbsp; By surgically cutting out parts of the brain in living rabbits and pigeons, and then observing their effects on motor activity, sensitivity, and behavior, he showed that different parts of the brain had different functions.&nbsp; By removing the cerebral hemispheres, all perception and judgment were lost.&nbsp; By removing the cerebellum, the animal lost motor coordination.&nbsp; Removing the brainstem caused death.&nbsp; <br /><br />Over the past two centuries, ever more precise experiments of this sort has demonstrated the modular structure of the brain with localized functions.&nbsp; As I have argued in some previous posts (<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2009/10/emergent-evolution-of-soul-in-neocortex.html">here</a>, <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2008/05/adam-zeman-and-neuroscience-of-soul.html">here,</a> and <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.it/2008/05/e-o-wilson-wendell-berry-and-question.html">here).</a>, this suggests how we can explain the mind through the emergent&nbsp;evolution of the brain.<br /><br />Jefferson explained to Adams: "Flourens proves that the cerebrum is the thinking organ, and that life and health may continue, and the animal be entirely without thought, if deprived of that organ.&nbsp; I wish to see what the spirtualists will say to this.&nbsp; Whether, in this state, the soul remains in the body deprived of its essence of thought, or whether it leaves it as in death and where it goes?" (January 8, 1825).<br /><br />Adams was not convinced: "As to the decision of your Author, though I wish to see the Book, I look upon it as a mere game at push-pin Incision knives will never discover the distinction between matter and spirit, or whether there is any or not, that there is an active principle of power in the Universe is apparent--but in what substance that active principle of power resides, is past our investigation, the faculties of our understanding are not adequate to penetrate the Universe, let us do our duty which is to do as we would be done by, and that one would think, could not be difficult, if we honestly aim at it" (January 22, 1825).<br /><br />Regardless of which side we might take&nbsp;in this debate,&nbsp;we can see here two of the most prominent of the American founders engaged in&nbsp;a friendly discussion&nbsp;of one of the deepest questions in philosophy, which&nbsp;manifests their love of the life of the mind.<br /><br />But even if this shows that Adams and Jefferson recognized intellectual inquiry to be a human good, it doesn't necessarily show that they thought this was the <em>highest </em>good, and that the philosophic life should be ranked as naturally the best life for human beings.&nbsp; After all, they had devoted most of their lives to politics and the pursuit of political glory.&nbsp; They were moved by the love of fame, which, Hamilton said in <em>The Federalist</em>, is "the ruling passion of the noblest minds."&nbsp; After he was defeated by Jefferson in the presidential election of 1800, Adams fell into deep depression, and he wrote many letters to Benjamin Rush complaining that Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton had robbed him of the glory that was rightfully his.&nbsp; (Douglass Adair's "Fame and the Founding Fathers" studied this pervasive love of political fame among the founders.)<br /><br />For the Straussians, the philosophic life is the only naturally highest good--<em>summum bonum</em>--for human beings.&nbsp; But, remarkably, as I have argued in some previous posts (<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2011/07/strauss-on-supremacy-of-philosophic.html">here,</a> <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2016/09/smith-and-strauss-on-bourgeois.html">here,</a> and <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-rhetoric-of-aristotles-praise-of.html">here),</a> Strauss and the Straussians have never offered any rational <em>proof </em>for this claim.&nbsp; They often point to Book 10 of Aristotle's <em>Nicomachean Ethics </em>as presenting the arguments for why the philosophic life is naturally higher than the moral or political life.&nbsp; But they never acknowledge the remarkable implausibility and strangeness of those arguments.&nbsp; In fact, those arguments are so strange and so contradictory to what Aristotle says elsewhere in the <em>Ethics</em>, that one might suspect that Aristotle is being ironical.<br /><br />Rather than there being a single dominant <em>summum bonum</em> for all beings, Aristotle in his books on friendship in the <em>Ethics</em> suggests an inclusive end conception of the human good: there might be diverse generic human goods that are rightly ranked in different ways for different individuals with different propensities and talents.&nbsp; As I have noted in a previous post (<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-biological-naturalism-of-lockean.html">here),</a> West has seen this idea in Locke: in the natural pursuit of happiness, there is a <em>summum bonum</em>, but it differs for each individual, so that there is no single <em>summum bonum</em> for all human beings.<br /><br />We could say, then, that the founders rightly saw that intellectual understanding is naturally desirable for human beings, and thus is one of the generic goods of life.&nbsp; But only a few people, like Socrates, will have the natural propensities and talents that incline them to rank intellectual understanding above all the other naturally desirable goods of life.&nbsp; Those like the founders will rank the human goods differently, with political glory at the top, although they&nbsp;can also show a love of intellectual inquiry, as did Adams and Jefferson, in their private lives and when they&nbsp;are retired&nbsp;from political life.<br /><br />We must still wonder whether the founders would agree with Pangle and other Straussians about the "tension or gulf between the philosophic and the political life," so that all societies must persecute philosophers who speak and write openly about what they believe to be true, and philosophers must learn to speak and write esoterically to conceal what they really think to avoid persecution.&nbsp; West seems to say that the founders would agree with this, but what he says about this is somewhat ambiguous and confusing.<br /><br />He suggests that the founders would have agreed with what Strauss wrote in "Persecution and the Art of Writing" about the "limits of Enlightenment" (198-201).&nbsp; West says that "some of the founders (and perhaps all the preeminent ones) accept the view, attributed by Leo Strauss to premodern philosophers, 'that the gulf separating 'the wise' and 'the vulgar' was a basic fact of human nature which could not be influenced by any progress of popular education: philosophy, or science, was essentially a privilege of the few'" (201).&nbsp; Strauss also said that those premodern philosophers who believed this thought that "public communication of the philosophic or scientific truth was impossible or undesirable, not only for the time being but for all times" (Strauss, 34).&nbsp; Strauss seemed to endorse this premodern view.<br /><br />"Most founders," West believes, "were aware of the limits of popular enlightenment."&nbsp; West speaks of "some" or "most" of the founders as rejecting the modern conception of popular enlightenment, because some of them--particularly Jefferson--"did at times express strong hopes for a more general diffusion of knowledge" (198).<br /><br />In their correspondence, Jefferson and Adams agreed that the 18th century "certainly witnessed the sciences and arts, manners and morals, advanced to a higher degree than the world had ever seen," and that "the arts and sciences . . . advanced gradually thro' all the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, softening and correcting the manners and morals of man," and "to the great honor of science and the arts, . . . their natural effect is, by illuminating public opinion, to erect it into a Censor, before which the most exalted tremble for their future, as well as present fame" (Jefferson to Adams, January 11, 1816).&nbsp; So it seems that both Jefferson and Adams embraced the modern idea of popular enlightenment.<br /><br />West indicates that most of the founders rejected what Strauss described in the following passage of "Persecution and the Art of Writing" as the view of "modern philosophers":<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"They believed that suppression of free inquiry, and of publication of the results of free inquiry, was accidental, an outcome of the faulty construction of the body politic, and that the kingdom of general darkness could be replaced by the republic of universal light.&nbsp; They looked forward to a time when, as a result of the progress of popular education, practically complete freedom of speech would be possible, or--to exaggerate for purposes of clarification--to a time when no one would suffer any harm from any truth" (Strauss 34).</blockquote>West&nbsp;is silent, however,&nbsp;about Strauss's observation at the beginning of his essay that since the middle of the 19th century, many countries&nbsp;"have enjoyed a practically complete freedom of public discussion" (Strauss, 22).&nbsp; This contradicts Strauss's premodern view that such practically complete freedom of speech is "impossible or undesirable."&nbsp; Or is Strauss suggesting that while the success of modern liberal freedom of speech shows that it is <em>possible</em>, it is still <em>undesirable</em>?&nbsp; If Strauss thought a modern liberal open society was undesirable, should we infer that he taught esoterically the need to overturn liberal societies like America and replace them with illiberal societies?&nbsp; Since Strauss himself fled from the illiberal society of Nazi Germany and settled in a liberal America where he could live and teach the philosophic life without persecution, does that show that Strauss recognized the superiority of the modern liberal social order to any illiberal social order?&nbsp; If so, was Strauss a Midwest Straussian?<br /><br />West says that&nbsp;the founders&nbsp;would agree with&nbsp;James Kent's claim that freedom of speech in America includes "free and decent discussions on any religious&nbsp;opinion," which is illustrated by the free circulation in America of Thomas Paine's <em>Age of Reason</em>, published in 1796, which was a scholarly critique of the Bible (209).<em>&nbsp;</em>But if so, does this show that the founders did not agree with the premodern view that practically complete freedom of speech was "impossible or undesirable"?<br /><br />Arthur Melzer's book <em>Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing </em>helps us to think through these questions as they arise in the study of the history of esoteric writing.&nbsp; In my series of posts on this (<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2015/01/strauss-melzer-and-esoteric-writing.html">here,</a> <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2015/01/was-leo-strauss-midwest-straussian.html">here,</a> <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2015/02/does-flynn-effect-show-success-of.html">here,</a> and <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2015/07/did-strauss-think-that-liberalisms.html">here),</a> I have suggested that Melzer's book points to a contradiction in Strauss's account of esoteric writing.&nbsp; On the one hand, Strauss seems to agree with the pre-modern view that esoteric writing is necessary and desirable because of the natural conflict between the philosophic life of the few and the moral, religious, or political life of the many.&nbsp; On the other hand, Strauss seems to agree with the modern view that in a liberal or open society, there is no natural conflict between the philosophic life and the practical life, and therefore esoteric writing is unnecessary and undesirable.<br /><br />I see a similar contradiction in West's account of the founders understanding of popular enlightenment.&nbsp; On the one hand, he indicates that the founders--or at least <em>most </em>of them--agreed with what Strauss identified as the premodern view that the natural and necessary conflict between philosophy and politics makes complete freedom of speech and thought impossible or undesirable.&nbsp; On the other hand, West indicates that the founders wanted to protect "free and decent discussions" on any subject, and that many of the founders showed a love of philosophy.<br /><br />If West is claiming that the founders were on the side of the modern liberal philosophers in striving for a complete freedom of speech and thought that includes the freedom to live the philosophic life, and if West is at least implicitly claiming that this has proven to be both possible and desirable, then&nbsp;he is following the path of Martin Diamond in&nbsp;arguing for Midwest Straussianism.<br /><br />Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-66998456131244715452017-08-02T16:27:00.000+01:002017-08-02T16:27:29.353+01:00West on the American Founding (4): Character Formation in Voluntary Associations without Governmental CoercionI have argued that Martin Diamond's Midwest Straussian interpretation of the American founding is superior to Tom West's interpretation, because Diamond rightly saw that the founders recognized that the virtuous character of the people was best formed by civil society--by families and voluntary associations in private life--without legal coercion by government.&nbsp; In a&nbsp;liberal regime&nbsp;like that favored by the founders, the purpose of government is liberty, while the purpose of society is virtue.<br /><br />Throughout much of his book, West rejects this separation of government as promoting liberty and society as promoting virtue, because he argues "that according to the founders, virtue is necessary for freedom, and that government cannot rely solely on private institutions such as families and churches to sustain it" (270).&nbsp; "Enforcement of moral law," he insists, is "the purpose of government" (177-81).&nbsp; In some parts of his book, however, West seems to agree with Diamond that the founders thought the purpose of government was liberty rather than virtue, and that the cultivation of virtue was the concern of private society (405-10).<br /><br />The importance of voluntary associations in forming the moral, religious, and intellectual&nbsp;character&nbsp;of Americans was noticed by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s, and recently scholars like Kevin Butterfield--in <em>The Making of Tocqueville's America: Law and Association in the Early United States </em>(2015)--have written the history of this.&nbsp; Butterfield shows how these voluntary associations were extensions into private society of the social compact theory of government: people organized themselves into societies by writing and consenting to constitutions that became the supreme law for securing the ends that they wanted to promote.&nbsp; <br /><br />As one of many examples of&nbsp;what he calls&nbsp;"everyday constitutionalism," Butterfield tells the story of the Ladies Literary Society of Norwich, Connecticut that was founded in 1800 when a small group of women wrote a constitution declaring: "we the undersigned do agree to form ourselves into a Society, by the name of the Ladies Literary Society for the special purpose of Enlightening our understandings, expanding our Ideas, and promoting useful knowledge among our Sex; to this end we propose we assemble ev'ry other Wednesday eve, or ev'ry Wednesday from the first of October, to the first of March from 7 Oclock till 9" (93-94).&nbsp; Following this same pattern of constitutional founding, associations were established for every conceivable social purpose--including moral and religious reform, as in the temperance societies and the anti-slavery societies.<br /><br />West cites Butterfield's book with approval (West, 255).&nbsp; But West is silent about Butterfield's emphasis on the "voluntary principle" in these associations, which denied the need or the right of government to coercively enforce morality or religion.&nbsp; For example, West defends the establishment of religion by state governments as a necessary way for government to promote religion.&nbsp; But Butterfield argues that the disestablishment of religion in the states after the Revolution--with Massachusetts in 1833 being the last state to terminate its state religious establishment--showed the trend toward "fully voluntary religious societies."&nbsp; And as a consequence of this, church membership increased dramatically in the first half of the 19th century, which demonstrated that religious belief was promoted by a total separation of church and state&nbsp;(Butterfield, 29-37).&nbsp; This vindicated Roger Williams' argument for a "wall of separation" between "civil" matters supervised by government and "spiritual" matters left to the conscience of private individuals.<br /><br />What one sees here in these voluntary associations--churches, schools, clubs, moral reform societies, business firms, mutual aid societies, and utopian communities--is what we might call "private lawmaking" or "private governance," which has been the subject of a previous post (<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-evolution-of-governance-and.html">here).</a>&nbsp; We could also see this as showing what is required in what Douglass North and his colleagues have called the "open access" society (the subject of a post <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2013/04/does-evolution-of-open-access-societies.html">here).</a> Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-46977309485812584682017-07-28T13:07:00.000+01:002017-08-04T20:43:04.826+01:00West on the American Founding (3): The Legal Enforcement of Religion?In 1964, I was a student in Big Spring High School in Big Spring, Texas.&nbsp; At the beginning of each school day, there was a reading of some Bible verses and a prayer over the public address system.&nbsp; The next year, this stopped, because the school district chose to follow the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court in <em>Engel v. Vitale</em>&nbsp;(1962) and <em>Abington v. Schempf </em>(1963), which declared that state sponsored Bible reading and prayer in public schools violate the First Amendment prohibition of any establishment of religion.<br /><br />According to Tom West, these Supreme Court decisions were contrary to the American founders' belief that state governments should promote religious belief&nbsp;to form the moral and religious character of the citizens in a manner&nbsp;that supported the good order and liberty of American public life, and that one way to do this is to have Bible reading and prayers in public schools.&nbsp; <br /><br />West also points out that the no establishment of religion clause of the First Amendment applies only to the national government ("Congress shall make no law . . ."), and not to the states, because the Founders wanted state governments to legally enforce morality and religion.&nbsp; The fact that the United States Constitution says nothing about the legal enforcement of morality and religion does not mean that the founders thought this was not a proper function of government, because they assumed that this would be a matter for the state governments rather than the national government.&nbsp; Of course, West recognizes, the founders thought the legislative promotion of religious belief would have to be consistent with the natural right of religious liberty, so that no one would be compelled by government to profess a religious belief contrary to their conscience.<br /><br />I agree with West that the founders thought religion was important for the moral order of a free society.&nbsp; I agree that they thought that the best way to promote religion was to secure religious freedom so that families, churches, and other private associations could provide religious instruction, with everyone being free to embrace any religious tradition that respects the liberty of other religious groups.<br /><br />I disagree, however, with West's claim that the founders thought the coercive enforcement of religious belief by law was a necessary function of government that was consistent with religious liberty.&nbsp; When I was a high school student in Big Spring, I was a devout fundamentalist Baptist.&nbsp; But this had nothing to do with the few minutes of Bible reading and prayer at the beginning of the school day.&nbsp; My religious beliefs came from my daily reading of the Bible early in the morning before I went to school and from my membership in a Baptist church.&nbsp; <br /><br />If there is a natural desire for religious understanding rooted in our evolved human nature, then we can expect that in a free society religious belief will arise spontaneously in the natural and voluntary associations of society without any need for governmental enforcement.&nbsp; That is what the founders wanted to happen.&nbsp; But West seems to believe that the founders would have been distressed by the possibility that religious belief must disappear if it is not legally enforced by government through means such as state-sponsored Bible reading and prayer in the public schools.<br /><br />West identifies eight ways in which American governments have supported religion (208-212).&nbsp; Oddly, most of these means of supporting religion turn out to be remarkably weak, and many were rejected during the founding period.&nbsp; In fact, West even admits that many of them were contrary to what the founders wanted.&nbsp; As he says, "some means of support were already contentious in the founding and were mostly abandoned soon afterwards" (208).<br /><br />First, taxpayer funding of particular Christian denominations was common in the American colonies.&nbsp; But West admits that after 1776 only four New England states--Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut--continued to do this.&nbsp; By 1833, even these four states had rejected this policy.&nbsp; Doesn't this contradict West's argument for how the founders wanted state governments to promote religion?<br /><br />Second, churches in most states were exempt from property taxes, and this has continued up to the present.<br /><br />Third, West notes that&nbsp;many state governments supported teaching "a sort of generic Protestantism" in the public schools through prayers, Bible reading, and religious themes in some of the instruction.&nbsp; This is what the Supreme Court overturned in the early 1960s.<br /><br />West is silent, however, about the evidence that there was very little religious instruction in the public schools in the 19th century, evidence that is surveyed by R. Laurence Moore (2000).&nbsp; When Horace Mann became the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1837, he complained about the "alarming deficiency of moral and religious instruction" in the schools.&nbsp; In 1846, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church issued a report lamenting that "the common school system is rapidly assuming not a mere negative, but a pointedly anti-Christian character."&nbsp; After the Civil War, many states had legislation that explicitly limited Bible reading in the public schools to no more than five minutes at the beginning of the school day as a "morning form" exercise.&nbsp; So&nbsp;religious instruction was not an important part of the regular school day.&nbsp; That was my experience at Big Spring High School.&nbsp; There was no religious instruction in the school at all.&nbsp; The Bible reading and prayer at the beginning of the day was nothing more than a ceremonial exercise that lasted no more than a few minutes.<br /><br />Fourth, West thinks that state laws for punishing blasphemy promoted religious belief.&nbsp; He weakens his argument, however,&nbsp;by agreeing with historian Mark McGarvie that these laws "were generally ignored as anachronisms of an earlier age."&nbsp; The anti-blasphemy laws were almost never enforced.<br /><br />Nevertheless, West observes that there were "a few reported cases" of people being punished legally for blasphemy.&nbsp; He doesn't tell his readers how many cases there were.&nbsp; He is silent about the report of one historian that he could identify no fewer than 20 blasphemy cases in the first half of the 19th century, which is less than one blasphemy case per state in 50 years.&nbsp; Chris Beneke (2015) reports this in an article that West quotes favorably, but he does not mention this.<br /><br />The one case that West highlights is <em>People v. Ruggles</em>, a 1811 New York Supreme Court case with a famous opinion written by James Kent, which is often quoted by those who want to make the argument that America was intended by the founders to be a "Christian nation."&nbsp; Kent upheld the defendant's conviction for blasphemy in saying "Jesus Christ was a bastard, and his mother must be a whore."&nbsp; Such words were surely uttered with a "wicked and malicious disposition" to be publicly offensive, Kent wrote, and "not in a serious discussion upon any controverted point in religion."<br /><br />"The free, equal, and undisturbed, enjoyment of religious opinion, whatever it may be, and free and decent discussions on any religious subject, is granted and secured," Kent insisted, "but to revile, with malicious and blasphemous contempt, the religion professed by almost the whole community, is an abuse of that right."&nbsp; So, for example, Kent indicated Tom Paine's attack on Biblical Christianity in <em>The Age of Reason </em>should be protected as a "decent discussion."&nbsp; And, in fact, the publication of Paine's book in America was not punished as blasphemy.<br /><br />Kent also indicated that blasphemy against Islam should not be punished, because Muhammed was obviously an "impostor."<br /><br />In reporting this case, West does not tell his reader that Mr. Ruggles' punishment for blasphemy was remarkably light--three months in prison and a $500 fine.&nbsp; According to the Mosaic law (Leviticus 24:16) adopted in Massachusetts and other American colonies, blasphemy was a capital crime.&nbsp; West is very clear in declaring that the natural right to religious liberty does not include the right of religious believers to kill infidels, because "religious liberty must be exercised without harming others" (33).&nbsp; West often appeals to this libertarian principle of "no harm" as part of the founders' understanding (33-35, 140, 148-53).&nbsp; <br /><br />Should we say that&nbsp;a New Testament Christianity that enforces the Mosaic law of the Old Testament violates natural rights?&nbsp;&nbsp;If so, we would have to accept&nbsp;the argument of Roger Williams that the New Testament demands an absolute separation of church and state, and thus a rejection of Old Testament theocracy, but this would contradict West's argument for the legal enforcement of religious belief.<br /><br />Jefferson is famous for declaring: "it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god.&nbsp; It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."&nbsp; But West says that "almost every leading founder" disagreed with this claim.&nbsp; In fact, even Jefferson himself contradicted it in asking, "Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?"&nbsp; If too many of my neighbors say "there is no god," West asserts, the liberties of the people will have no "firm basis," and thus my atheist neighbors will have done me a great injury (205).<br /><br />Well, then, why wasn't Mr. Ruggles executed?&nbsp; And why were there no more than 20 cases of people tried for blasphemy over 50 years in America?&nbsp; Why didn't the founders continue the colonial tradition of legally enforcing the Mosaic law with capital punishment for blasphemy and infidelity?<br /><br />West does not mention that in one of&nbsp;John Adams'&nbsp;letters to Jefferson (January 23, 1825), Adams said that he hoped that all the state laws against blasphemy would be repealed, and only then would religious liberty be secure.<br /><br />The fifth means for legally enforcing religion is to have a religious test for public office.&nbsp; All of the state constitutions except for Virginia and New York had such tests.&nbsp; West quotes the oath that members of the Pennsylvania state legislature had to take: "I do believe in one God, the creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good and punisher of the wicked, and I do acknowledge the scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration."<br /><br />West explains: "The argument for religious tests was the same as for other forms of government support: that religion supports morality" (210).&nbsp; He then quotes from a speaker at the Massachusetts ratifying convention who condemned the "no religious test" clause of the U.S. Constitution: no religious tests "would admit deists, atheists, etc., into the general government; and, people being apt to imitate the examples of the court, these principles would be disseminated, and, of course, a corruption of morals ensue."<br /><br />West identifies religious tests as part of the "founders' consensus."&nbsp; But if this is so, why did the founders at the Constitutional Convention vote unanimously and without any controversy for "no religious tests" in the Constitution?&nbsp; And why did all of the states with religious tests abolish them during the founding period, thus following the example of the national constitution?<br /><br />To explain this, West says that Chris Beneke "rightly notes" that in "founding America . . . libertarian principles . . . repeatedly triumphed over local prejudices and discriminatory laws."<br /><br />So now it seems that the "founding consensus" is based on "libertarian principles" dictating that the legal enforcement of religious belief is not necessary to avoid a corruption of morals.&nbsp; But this contradicts West's argument for the legal enforcement of religion as essential to the "founding consensus."<br /><br />West does not mention the most revealing evidence that most of the founders were not Christians, which comes from a notorious episode in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia. On June 28th, the delegates appeared to be deadlocked in their debates because of the opposing interests of large States and small States. Benjamin Franklin rose to propose that the Convention invite some local minister to attend and offer daily prayers to invoke the aid of God. "If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without God's notice, is it probable that an empire without his aid?" According to a popular legend, the Convention accepted Franklin's proposal, and from the moment that they had these prayers, the deadlock was broken by God's providential intervention. This story has been repeated by many American ministers as evidence that the American Constitution was divinely inspired.&nbsp; <br /><br />I first heard this story as a child when it was part of a sermon at the First Baptist Church of Wills Point, Texas.&nbsp; But years later, as a college student in a class at the University of Dallas on the American Founding,&nbsp;I was shocked when I&nbsp;looked at James Madison's notes for the Convention as edited by Max Farrand in the Yale University Press edition (particularly 1:450-52, 3:470-73, 3:499, 3:531),&nbsp;and I saw&nbsp;that this story&nbsp;was false. Franklin did make&nbsp;a motion&nbsp;for daily prayer at the Convention, which was seconded by Roger Sherman.&nbsp; But the response was silence.&nbsp; Finally, Alexander Hamilton offered a quip about how they did not need "foreign aid." The motion was dropped without a vote.<br /><br />This is not the action of good Christians. It is the action of men who respected religious belief, but who did not believe that God would answer their prayers and intervene to promote their political success. Since the meetings of the Convention were kept secret, they were not concerned about public appearances. If the meetings had been open to the public, they&nbsp;surely would have felt compelled to accept Franklin's motion.<br /><br />West might say that this only confirms his claim that the founders support for religion was based not on their belief that religion was <em>true </em>but on their belief that it was <em>useful </em>for supporting morality, because while a few human beings are enlightened enough to see the rational argument for morality, the great multitude of human beings lack such rationality, and for them morality must be based on religious faith, regardless of whether that faith is true&nbsp;(see 198-203).&nbsp; <br /><br />But if West is right about this, why did the founders decide that there was no need for religious tests for those in public offices?&nbsp; Did they assume that those in public offices would be the enlightened few who did not need religious belief to support their moral character?&nbsp; Or did their "libertarian principles" lead them to believe that public officeholders would have their moral character shaped by American society in ways that did not require any legal enforcement of religious belief?&nbsp; After all, even though there are no legally enforced religious tests for public office in America, there is an informal social expectation that officeholders will not publicly identify themselves as atheists.<br /><br />The sixth means of enforcing religion mentioned by West is the support for chaplains in legislatures and the military and the use of government buildings for religious activity.<br /><br />The seventh means is Sunday closing laws.&nbsp; Oddly, however, West is silent about the intense controversy in the 19th century over the federal law mandating delivery of the mail on Sundays.&nbsp; From 1775 to 1912, mail was delivered seven days a week.&nbsp; For Christians, this was a violation of the Sabbath.<br /><br />The final means of enforcing religion noted by West is official proclamations and ceremonies with religious themes, such as national days of prayer and thanksgiving.<br /><br />As one looks over&nbsp;West's list of&nbsp;eight means of legally enforcing religion, one has to notice how remarkably weak they are, and how the "libertarian principles" of the founders "repeatedly triumphed over local prejudices and discriminatory laws."<br /><br />West often appeals to the libertarian "harm principle"--that the government should punish&nbsp;individuals only for&nbsp;conduct that harms others (33-35, 140, 148-53, 234).&nbsp; For example, he notes that while the state laws regulating sex were strict during the founding period, they were hardly ever enforced except when the violations were "open and notorious."&nbsp; "Conduct that is not harmful if kept private could safely be ignored."&nbsp; The strict enforcement of these laws punishing victimless crimes began at the end of the 19th century through the influence of "moralistic Progressivism," which was contrary to the founding (233-34).<br /><br />One can also see in the state laws concerning religion a fundamental contradiction that is clearly conveyed in the Delaware Constitution of 1792: "Although it is the duty of all men frequently to assemble together for the public worship of the Author of the universe, and piety and morality, on which the prosperity of communities depends, are thereby promoted; yet no man shall be compelled to attend any religious worship, [or] to contribute to the erection or support of [any church]."<br /><br />On the one hand, the state needs the piety and morality promoted by religious activity; on the other hand, the state cannot compel that religious activity without violating religious liberty.<br /><br />There are only two ways to escape this contradiction.&nbsp; The theocratic way is to legally establish a religion and thus give up religious liberty, which is what the colonial governments like Massachusetts did before the Revolution.&nbsp; The libertarian way is to erect a "wall of separation" between church and state, as Roger Williams called it, which is what Williams did in Rhode Island.&nbsp; In some previous posts (<a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2012/12/roger-williams-was-right-biblical-basis.html">here</a> and <a href="http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2014/02/does-new-testament-teach-classical.html">here),</a> I have argued that Williams was correct, and that his Christian libertarianism was rooted in New Testament Christianity.<br /><br />When Williams was forced to leave the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 and move with his followers to Providence, they established a new government by signing this agreement: "We whose names are hereunder, desirous to inhabit in the town of Providence, do promise to subject ourselves in active and passive obedience to all orders or agreements as shall be made for the public good of the body in an orderly way, by the major consent of present inhabitants, masters of families, incorporated together in a Towne fellowship, and others whom they shall admit unto them only in civil things."&nbsp; <br /><br />Since the town meeting was limited to "civil things" as opposed to "spiritual things," this was the first expression in the new world of the absolute separation of church and state.<br /><br />The state of Virginia followed the libertarian path of Williams.&nbsp; Section 16 of the Bill of Rights in the 1776 Constitution guaranteed "free exercise of religion," asserting that "the duty which we owe to our creator, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence."&nbsp; The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, adopted in January 1786, stipulated that "our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions" and guaranteed that "all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities." No Virginian would be required to "frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever."<br /><br />West tries to argue that this Virginian separation of church and state, as promoted by Jefferson and Madison, was not typical for the American founders.&nbsp; But West has to admit that the historical movement in the states after 1787 was toward the "libertarian principles" of Williams, Jefferson, and Madison.Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.com0